How We Know Black Holes Exist

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Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Space Telescope Science Institute for supporting this video. Support MinutePhysics on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/minutephysics Link to Patreon Supporters: http://www.minutephysics.com/supporters/ This video is about the astronomical amount of astronomical evidence for black holes, ranging from x-ray binaries with accretion disks, supermassive infrared-radiating galactic nuclei black holes, orbital characteristics of high mass binaries, and direct gravitational wave detection of inspiraling merging black hole binaries with LIGO. Yes, they're real. REFERENCES Interactive: Masses in the Stellar Graveyard https://ligo.northwestern.edu/media/mass-plot/index.html Galactic Center Orbital Models and Inner Stellar Distributions Data provided by Andrea Ghez and Sylvana Yelda, UCLA (obtained with the Keck Telescopes) Visualization by Stuart Levy and Robert Patterson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/astrophysics/galactic-center-orbital-models-and-inner-stellar-distributions Masses of observed black Holes: https://stellarcollapse.org/bhmasses Downloadable LIGO Data: https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170817/ LIGO Neutron Star Binary Merger: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/10/ligo-detects-a-neutron-star-merger Masses of observed neutron stars: https://stellarcollapse.org/nsmasses Cygnus X-1 X-ray binary Black Hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1#Star_system Lecture notes on black holes: http://eagle.phys.utk.edu/guidry/astro616/lectures/lecture_ch18.pdf Calvera isolated neutron star X-ray source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvera_(X-ray_source) Scientific American: pulsar that behaves like a black hole https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-pretenders-may-be-superfast-spinning-pulsars/ Largest known neutron star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_J0348%2B0432 http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=PSR+J0348%2B0432 Large Neutron Star: https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0024 Wandering Black Hole: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/x-ray-telescopes-find-evidence-for-wandering-black-hole.html Sagittarius A* Black Hole Infrared emissions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.4659.pdf MinutePhysics is on twitter - @minutephysics And facebook - http://facebook.com/minutephysics And Google+ (does anyone use this any more?) - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6 Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute! Created by Henry Reich