Space is terrifyingly quiet. You've probably spent your whole life calling those bottomless pits in the fabric of spacetime "black holes," but that hasn't always been the case. Honestly, the term itself is kind of a marketing fluke. It's catchy. It's punchy. It sounds like something out of a 1950s pulp novel, which is probably why it stuck so well in the public imagination. But if you talk to an astrophysicist or dig through old Soviet research papers, you’ll find a whole library of other names for a black hole that describe these cosmic monsters in ways that are arguably more accurate—and definitely more haunting.
John Wheeler usually gets the credit for coining the term "black hole" in 1967. However, history is messy. He likely picked it up from someone else at a conference, possibly a student or a colleague who was tired of saying "gravitationally completely collapsed object." Imagine trying to write a headline with that mouthful. It just doesn't work. Before Wheeler popularized the modern name, the scientific community was basically in a naming war. Some names focused on the math, while others focused on the terrifying physical reality of what happens when a star dies and keeps on shrinking forever.
The Frozen Star: A Relic of Relativity
One of the coolest—and most scientifically descriptive—alternative names is the Frozen Star. This wasn't just some poetic nickname; it was the standard way many researchers, especially in the Soviet Union, referred to these objects for decades.
Why "frozen"?
It’s all about time dilation. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, gravity warps time. The stronger the gravity, the slower time ticks. If you were brave (or foolish) enough to watch a friend fall toward a black hole, you would never actually see them fall in. From your perspective, as they approach the event horizon, their movement would slow down. They would get redder and redder. Eventually, they would appear to just stop—frozen in time at the very edge of the abyss. To an outside observer, the object is a star that has literally frozen in place.
Of course, for the person falling in, things are much more "spaghettified." They don't feel frozen at all. They cross the horizon and meet their doom quite quickly. This discrepancy between the observer and the traveler is why "frozen star" eventually fell out of fashion. It only describes what we see, not what actually is.
Collapsars and the Death of Giants
In the late 1960s and early 70s, you’d frequently see the term Collapsar in academic journals. It's a portmanteau of "collapsed star." While we use "black hole" as a catch-all now, "collapsar" has stuck around in a more niche way. Today, astronomers often use it specifically to describe the old-school process of a massive star—usually more than 15 or 20 times the mass of our sun—undergoing a catastrophic gravitational collapse.
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This collapse triggers a long-duration gamma-ray burst, one of the brightest explosions in the universe. If you hear a researcher at NASA talking about a "collapsar model," they aren't just talking about a hole in space. They are talking about the violent, messy birth of a black hole from a dying supernova. It’s a more active, energetic term. It reminds us that these things aren't just "holes"; they are the remains of something that was once very much alive and burning.
Dark Stars and the Newtonian Nightmare
Long before Einstein, people were already dreaming up invisible monsters. In 1783, an English clergyman named John Michell wrote a letter to the Royal Society. He used the term Dark Star. His logic was surprisingly sound for someone living in the era of horse-drawn carriages. Michell knew that every planet or star has an escape velocity—the speed you need to travel to break free from its gravity.
He calculated that if a star was dense enough and large enough, its escape velocity would exceed the speed of light.
Since nothing can go faster than light, the light itself would be sucked back down to the surface. The star would be invisible to us. It would be dark. Pierre-Simon Laplace came to a similar conclusion a few years later. For over a century, these "dark stars" were a theoretical curiosity, a weird quirk of Newtonian physics that most people ignored because it seemed impossible for matter to be that dense.
Schwarzschild Singularities
If you want to sound like a real pro, you call them Schwarzschild Singularities. This name honors Karl Schwarzschild, the German physicist who solved Einstein’s field equations while serving on the front lines of World War I. He sent his findings to Einstein in 1916, just months before he died of a rare skin disease.
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Schwarzschild’s math pointed to a "magic sphere." If you squeezed mass into a small enough radius (the Schwarzschild radius), gravity would become infinite. For a long time, even Einstein thought this was just a mathematical glitch. He didn't think nature would actually allow something to become a "singularity"—a point of infinite density and zero volume. Calling it a "Schwarzschild singularity" acknowledges the mathematical weirdness at the heart of the object. It’s a reminder that at the center of every black hole, the laws of physics basically give up and stop making sense.
Gravitational Vacuums and Spacetime Punctures
You might occasionally hear "gravitational vacuum" or "spacetime puncture." These are more metaphorical. They describe the effect rather than the object. Since a black hole isn't actually a hole (it's a sphere of incredibly dense matter), these names can be a bit misleading. But they help people visualize the "well" that gravity creates. If you imagine spacetime as a trampoline, a black hole is like a bowling ball so heavy it rips a hole right through the fabric.
Variations Based on Size and Habitats
Not all black holes are created equal. Depending on where they live and how much they've eaten, they get different labels. These aren't just "other names"; they are specific classifications that tell you exactly what kind of beast you're dealing with.
- Primordial Black Holes: These are the theoretical babies of the universe. They didn't come from stars. Instead, they formed from the high-density "soup" of the Big Bang itself. They could be as small as an atom or as heavy as a mountain.
- Stellar-Mass Black Holes: The common variety. These are the "collapsars" mentioned earlier, created when a single star dies.
- Intermediate-Mass Black Holes (IMBHs): The "missing link" of the cosmos. These are harder to find and usually weigh between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun.
- Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs): The kings. We’re talking millions or billions of solar masses. They sit at the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way (ours is named Sagittarius A*).
- Ultramassive Black Holes: A relatively new term for the absolute units that make supermassive ones look tiny. Think 10 billion suns or more.
Why Does the Name Matter?
You might wonder why we care what they're called. Is it just semantics? Not really. Each name carries the "baggage" of the era it came from. "Dark Star" belongs to a world of classical physics. "Frozen Star" belongs to the early days of relativity. "Black Hole" belongs to the space race and the era of high-energy astrophysics.
Using different names helps scientists communicate specific properties. If a researcher writes about a "point mass" in a paper, they are treating the black hole as a mathematical coordinate. If they talk about an "Active Galactic Nucleus" (AGN), they are talking about a supermassive black hole that is currently eating gas and dust and spitting out massive amounts of radiation.
Misconceptions About the "Hole"
The biggest problem with the name "black hole" is that it makes people think of a drain. You've probably seen a dozen CGI renders of a funnel in space. But a black hole is a three-dimensional object. It's a sphere. If you could look at one safely, it would look like a black orb of nothingness, surrounded by the distorted light of the stars behind it (an effect called gravitational lensing).
It doesn't "suck" things in like a vacuum cleaner. Gravity is just gravity. If our Sun were magically replaced by a black hole of the exact same mass, the Earth wouldn't get sucked in. We’d keep orbiting in the exact same path, though we’d all freeze to death pretty quickly without the sunlight. The "hole" part only happens once you get too close—past the event horizon, where the escape velocity finally tops the speed of light.
Actionable Insights for Amateur Astronomers
If you're fascinated by these objects, you don't need a PhD to keep up with the latest discoveries. The terminology is evolving even now as we get better data from the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave detectors like LIGO.
- Follow the "Event Horizon Telescope" (EHT) updates. They are the team that gave us the first actual "photo" of a black hole (M87*). They often use more precise terminology regarding the "shadow" and "photon ring."
- Learn the difference between the Event Horizon and the Singularity. When people use other names for a black hole, they are often referring to one of these two distinct parts. The horizon is the "point of no return," while the singularity is the "crushed center."
- Check out the "Gravitational Wave" catalogs. Sites like LIGO list "Binary Black Hole Mergers." This is the modern way we "see" them—not by light, but by the ripples they make in space when they crash into each other.
- Use the term "Compact Object." If you want to sound like a pro at a star party, use this phrase. It’s the umbrella term for white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. It shows you understand that these are all just different stages of stellar death.
Space is weird. The names we give it are just our way of trying to make sense of the impossible. Whether you call it a Frozen Star, a Collapsar, or a Schwarzschild Singularity, you're talking about the most extreme environment in the known universe. Each name adds a layer of meaning to an object that, by its very nature, refuses to be seen.