[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ]

Part 3 of my 4-part series on black holes for Medium members is up; part 1 is here and part 2 is here. If enough of you read, they may keep me around to write more, so please read and share!

Seeing the Invisible

Black holes are invisible, but astronomers have developed a lot of ways to see them through the matter that surrounds them

In 1937, a deeply weird engineer named Grote Reber built a telescope in the lot next to his mother’s house in Wheaton, Illinois. Home observatories aren’t unusual, but Reber’s project was the first telescope designed to look for radio waves from space, and he was only the second person in history to find them. Karl Jansky, the first radio astronomer, had accidentally discovered astronomical radio waves while working on shortwave radio communications.

But Reber set out deliberately to study the cosmos in radio light. He found that the center of the Milky Way emitted a lot of radio waves and discovered an intense radio source in the constellation Cygnus. By the 1950s, astronomers found many other radio galaxies (as they were creatively named) that emitted very powerful radio waves from small regions at the centers of those galaxies.

As we learned in Part 2 of this series, the sources of the radio waves in the Milky Way and beyond turned out to be supermassive black holes: powerful gravitational dynamos millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. As with Reber’s discoveries, the study of black holes has been driven by invention and creativity. In fact, every new advance in astronomy has led to new discoveries about black holes, and new technologies are being invented for the purpose of studying these weird objects.

Read the rest at Medium…