Black Holes: A New Discovery
In Black Holes: A New Discovery, narrator Kate Yule details how radio telescopes picked up signals from neutron stars in the 1960s. Learn how their discovery suggested that black holes existed. Scientists believed that once something had fallen into a black hole, it appeared to be lost from the Universe forever, until Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can also emit particles and eventually disappear. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
Lesson Express
Q: What did scientists realize when they discovered neutron stars?
A: They realized that other examples of Einstein’s theory of relativity might also exist.
Q: What did Stephen Hawking discover in 1974 that changed what he previously thought about black holes?
A: He discovered that particles could leak out of a black hole.
Q: What eventually happens when particles keep escaping the black hole?
A: Eventually, the black hole shrinks, loses its mass, and disappears.