Originally posted by Albertarocks
I just crunched some numbers and yuppers... the guy is right. There are no black holes.

Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a well known galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus. It was discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources seen from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux of 2.3 × 10−23 Wm−2Hz−1. Cygnus X-1 was the first X-ray source widely accepted to be a black hole candidate and it remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. It is now estimated to have a mass about 8.7 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too compact to be any known kind of normal star or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon is probably about 26 km.

Cygnus X-1 belongs to a high-mass X-ray binary system about 6000 light years from the Sun that includes a blue supergiant variable star designated HDE 226868 which it orbits at about 0.2 AU, or 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. A stellar wind from the star provides material for an accretion disk around the X-ray source. Matter in the inner disk is heated to millions of kelvin (K), generating the observed X-rays. A pair of jets, arranged perpendicular to the disk, are carrying part of the infalling material away into interstellar space

Ever since Albert Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity, black holes has been central to our knowledge of the Universe.

Now experts say they have shown that the theoretical phenomenon, whose gravitational pull is thought to hold galaxies together, exist "beyond any reasonable doubt".

The team of scientists spent 16 years studying the existence of a super massive black hole thought to be at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

While the black hole itself is invisible to the eye, the team proved its existence by tracking the motions of 28 stars circling around it.

Just as swirling leaves caught in a gust of wind can provide clues about air currents, so the stars' movements reveal information about forces at work at the galactic centre.

The observations show that the stars orbit a central concentration of mass four million times greater than that of the Sun, claim the team from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich, Germany.

"Undoubtedly the most spectacular aspect of our long term study is that it has delivered what is now considered to be the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do really exist," said study leader Professor Reinhard Genzel.

"The stellar orbits in the galactic centre show that the central mass concentration of four million solar masses must be a black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt."

• “Schwarzschild’s solution” is not Schwarzschild’s solution. Schwarzschild’s actual solution does not predict black holes. The quantity ‘r’ appearing in the so-called “Schwarzschild solution” is not a distance of any kind. This simple fact completely subverts all claims for black holes.

• Despite claims for discovery of black holes, nobody has ever found a black hole; no infinitely dense point-mass singularity and no event horizon have ever been found. There is no physical evidence for the existence of infinitely dense point-masses.

• It takes an infinite amount of observer time to verify the presence of an event horizon, but nobody has been and nobody will be around for an infinite amount of time. No observer, no observing instruments, no photons, no matter can be present in a spacetime that by construction contains no matter.

• The black hole is fictitious and so there are no black hole generated gravitational waves. The international search for black holes and their gravitational waves is ill-fated.

• The Michell-Laplace dark body is not a black hole. Newton’s theory of gravitation does not predict black holes. General Relativity does not predict black holes. Black holes were spawned by (incorrect) theory, not by observation. The search for black holes is destined to find none.

• No celestial body has ever been observed to undergo irresistible gravitational collapse. There is no laboratory evidence for irresistible gravitational collapse. Infinitely dense point-mass singularities howsoever formed cannot be reconciled with Special Relativity, i.e. they violate Special Relativity, and therefore violate General Relativity.

• General Relativity cannot account for the simple experimental fact that two fixed bodies will approach one another upon release. There are no known solutions to Einstein’s field equations for two or more masses and there is no existence theorem by which it can even be asserted that his field equations contain latent solutions for such configurations of matter. All claims for black hole interactions are invalid.

• Einstein’s gravitational waves are fictitious; Einstein’s gravitational energy cannot be localised; so the international search for Einstein’s gravitational waves is destined to detect nothing. No gravitational waves have been detected.

• Einstein’s field equations violate the experimentally well-established usual conservation of energy and momentum, and therefore violate the experimental evidence.

In an audience of theoretical physicists there was stunned silence—and not a single question.