“black holes” discovered 200 years earlier than previously thought
(www.sott.net)https://www.sott.net/article/492895-The-forgotten-Enlightenment-era-cleric-who-predicted-black-holes-in-1783In 1750, [John Michell] published a paper on magnetism, introducing at least one entirely new law - the "inverse square law" - that furthered the application of magnets in navigation.
[In 1783], Michell deduced […] that it was also possible that the gravity of the most massive astral bodies might overpower their own light rays entirely. For a star to achieve this, it would need to be the same density as the Sun and about 500 times its size. Light would initially escape from such a star, perhaps making its way out to nearby orbiting planets but, Michell explained, "would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity".
Michell's astronomical work fell into obscurity and was only rediscovered during the second half of the 20th Century
In France, the polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the idea of dark stars independently of Michell during the late 1790s
In 1805, the astronomer Edward Pigott published a paper suggesting the likelihood of stars "that have never shewn a glimpse of brightness."
