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More than 40 quintillion black holes are estimated to exist in the universe, including about 100 million in the Milky Way, each with masses up to hundreds of times that of the sun.
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Black holes are locations where spacetime—the underlying fabric of the universe—is warped so severely that objects would need to move faster than the speed of light to escape the gravitational pull, and because nothing moves faster than light, nothing can escape a black hole after falling into its "edge," or event horizon.
Because light cannot escape black holes, they cannot be seen directly, but astronomers can infer their existence via the X-rays emitted by superheated infalling material and their gravitational effects on surrounding objects.
Black holes are created when sufficient mass and energy—equivalent quantities in physics—are sufficiently concentrated into a small volume and dramatically bend spacetime in the region, which can occur during the gravitational collapse of massive stars or the merger of very dense objects, such as neutron stars.
Predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of gravity in 1916, black holes did not have observational evidence to support their existence until 1964 with the discovery of Cygnus X-1—a binary system with a black hole feeding on material from its companion blue supergiant star.
Most, if not all, large galaxies are thought to contain a supermassive black hole at their center, and the first image of a black hole—published by the Event Horizon Telescope team in 2019—was the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87.
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