this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

We often find a black hole because other things we can see are orbiting a patch of nothing. Based on the orbits we can calculate how heavy the thing they should be orbiting is.

A black hole that doesn't have anything visibly in orbit around it would be much harder to find, since it'd just appear to be a patch of nothing with nothing around it--which describes most of outer space to begin with. Though we could still spot one based on how it bends the light coming from things roughly behind it.