PRESS: ‘Fantastical Phenomena, Illustrated,’ by David Kaiser

“Not so long ago, black holes seemed enigmatic, even to the experts who studied them. The idea was both alluring and fantastical: hypothetical hunks of matter compressed to enormous densities, warping their surrounding spacetime so strongly that even light could not escape. Although the phenomenon seemed to follow from the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, empirical evidence that black holes actually existed remained suggestive but indirect until February 2016, when members of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) published data from the first compelling detection of gravitational waves.”