A brief history of our hunt for dark stars to black holes during WWII

In spite of the decade lost to large-scale astronomical research, the discipline of physics thrived as a whole as a result of the war

Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime ever monitored: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep space. Only since 2015 have we been able to observe these invisible astronomical bodies, which can be detected only by their gravitational attraction. The history of our hunt for these enigmatic objects traces back to the 18th century, but the crucial phase took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.

The concept of a body that would