The Origins of Black Hole Exploration

When theorists like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose were first thinking about black holes in the 1960s, it kind of felt like they were maybe just a theorist crazy idea. In the early 70s, astronomers started to actually see evidence for these things for the first time. Since then, we've discovered a lot of other x-ray signals that we think are black holes. We've also observed gravitational waves from black holes merging. Even more recently, something called the Event Horizon Telescope produced the first image of a black hole.