One hundred years of black holes: The centenary of the Schwarschild solution

Abstract

Early this year, 2016, the consortium formed by LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Exactly 100 years earlier, Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist and astronomer with a refined mathematical background, surprised Einstein and the entire scientific community with an exact solution for the complicated equations of General Relativity. The conditions under which he worked on the problem were quite dramatic and became famous: fighting with the German army on the Russian front of the First World War. It is remarkable also that his work was almost simultaneous to Einstein's that led to the consolidation of General Relativity, just in time to have his solution recognized and cited in the final formulation of the Theory, published by Einstein in the same year of 1916. Since then called the Schwarzschild solution, it was the starting point for one of the most interesting sagas of the twentieth century Physics: the discovery of black holes and their fascinating physical properties, which are also behind the gravitational waves phenomena directly detected this year. We present here a bit of the historical and epistemological contexts of these remarkable discoveries and some of their main protagonists.