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You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey Shortwaivers, it's Space Camp First Officer Emily Kwong here.

And today, we're investigating one of our most mysterious cosmological phenomena out there, black holes.

It's like the point where all known laws of physics break down.

Priya Natarajan is an astrophysicist at Yale University, chair of the astronomy department, and she was named

one of times 100 most influential people, all because of her boundary pushing work on black holes.

So for me, the personal attraction,

the gravitational pull, pun intended,

to word black holes, I mean, really

is that they kind of represent the limits of knowledge.

I first spoke with Priya in 2020 and she explained to me that the discovery of black holes

first happened on paper through Einstein's math equations.

He described the universe as like a four-dimensional fabric,

fusing space and time.

And the fabric is bumpy, dotted with planets and other kinds of matter.

And what matter does, it causes little potholes and issues.

You drop mass somewhere, you create a pothole.

And Einstein's peers wondered, okay, well, what happens when you have an object whose mass is so compact that the pothole becomes a puncture in the fabric of space time itself?

And so the black hole solution is one of the simplest solutions to these very complex equations.

This theory of black holes was eventually confirmed in 1964.

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