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Article

Revisiting the Black Hole

JUN 01, 1999
A resurgence of theoretical and observational interest in black holes has given new impetus to the study of these intriguing objects.
Roger Blandford
Neil Gehrels

Twenty‐eight years ago, in a celebrated article in PHYSICS TODAY entitled “Introducing the Black Hole,” Remo Ruffini and John Wheeler filed a dispatch from the campaign to understand gravity. With hindsight, we now see that they wrote in the middle of a golden age—spanning the mid‐1960s and the late 1970s—when remarkable discoveries in the theory of general relativity were made to confront equally stunning developments in observational astronomy.

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References

  1. 1. J. Kormendy, J. D. Richstone, Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 33, 581 (1995).https://doi.org/ARAAAJ

  2. 2. M. J. Rees, Rev. Mod. Astron. 10, 179 (1997).https://doi.org/RMASEP

  3. 3. Y. Tanaka, N. Shibazaki, Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 34, 607 (1996).https://doi.org/ARAAAJ

  4. 4. K. S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, Norton, New York (1994).

More about the authors

Roger Blandford, Caltech, Pasadena, California.

Neil Gehrels, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

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This Content Appeared In
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Volume 52, Number 6

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