On this day in 1939, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his graduate student Hartland Snyder published their influential paper, “On Continued Gravitational Contraction,” in Physical Review.
The paper examined the gravitational collapse of massive stars and showed that, under certain conditions, a sufficiently massive star could continue collapsing under its own gravity, leading to what we now understand as the formation of a black hole.
Published in Physical Review 56, 455–459, the work became an important milestone in the development of modern black-hole physics, decades before observational evidence for these objects became available.
