Thank your lucky stars for black holes. Mysterious, terrifying and endlessly fascinating, these extreme objects are the gravitational anchors of every large galaxy – including our own — and help regulate star formation across the cosmos. They are the darkest objects in the universe, and yet curious Earthlings are drawn to them like moths to a 100,000 solar mass flame.
In his new book "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth" (The Experiment, 2025), science writer and physicist Jonas Enander invites us on a journey through time and space to unravel the history, the science and the enduring mystique of black holes. From a volcano-top observatory in Hawaii that helped capture the historic first image of a black hole to a World War I battlefield in France where one of the most important astrophysical equations was conceived, Enander speaks with Nobel laureates and retraces the steps of some of the greatest thinkers in physics to help put these monstrous cosmic objects into a tangible, human context.
