What do we really know about black holes? That may sound like an odd question. Aren't black holes and all their well-known attributes - the singularity, the event horizon, the ability to swallow light and matter - just part of the furniture of astrophysics? Strangely, no. Astronomers know of massive bodies that fit the bill, but for now black holes remain largely theoretical. So much so that some researchers even claim that they don't exist.
The debate over the existence of black holes has been rumbling on since about 1939, when Albert Einstein published a paper arguing that for a black hole to form, a collection of stars would have to orbit each other faster than the speed of light, which special relativity prohibited. That turned out to be wrong, but the point is that black holes are so weird, Einstein didn't believe in them - even though ...
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