Origin of Term Black Hole

Prior to 1967 black holes were called either frozen stars or collapsed stars. Neither term captures the imagination like the name black hole.

Few astronomical objects capture the public imagination like black holes. These exotic stellar corpses are so dense that their gravity prevents anything, even light, from escaping. It took a while for the idea to catch on. During World War I, Karl Schwarzschild's solution to Einstein's general relativity equations predicted the possibility of black holes and their event horizons, but few scientists took the idea seriously until the 1960s.

John A. Wheeler, who is usually credited with coining the name black hole, died last week at age 96. Despite providing the name and doing much to popularize the study of black holes, Wheeler did not buy the idea at first. At a scientific meeting in 1958, Wheeler disagreed with Robert Oppenheimer and said that such objects could not exist. Wheeler however eventually came to accept the possibility that such highly collapsed stars could exist and came up with the perfect name for them.

In his book, Black Holes and Warped Spacetime, Kip Thorne, a former student and colleague of Wheeler, describes how the term originated. They had been called collapsed stars by western researchers and frozen stars by Russian workers. According to Thorne, Wheeler pondered until he found the perfect name for these exotic objects. Wheeler then simply started using the name during a 1967 meeting, as if they had always been called black holes.

How much did finding this perfect name contribute to exciting the public imagination about black holes?