This is a book review of The Irresistable Attraction of Gravity: A Journey to Discover Black Holes by Luciano Rezzolla.
The Irresistable Attraction of Gravity: A Journey to Discover Black Holes by Luciano Rezzolla (Cambridge University Press), 2023. Pp. 293, 22 × 14 cm. Price £49.99/$64.99 (hardbound, ISBN 978 1 009 19877 6).
Luciano Rezzolla is professor of astrophysics at the University of Frankfurt (he is also a Senior Fellow at the nearby Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin). His main area of research is numerical relativity, particularly, especially recently, in connection with simulations of the appearance of phenomena associated with black holes; such simulations allow one to learn about the physical properties of such objects by comparing them with observations such as those by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, of which Rezzolla is a member. The introductory chapters are brief, but give enough information to understand the astrophysics discussed in the longer chapters, which cover the images of the supermassive black holes in the Milky Way and M87, neutron stars, black holes, and gravitational waves. Due to the length of the main chapters, the reader gets more details than from a similar article in a popular-science magazine, and also an interesting behind-the-scenes look at big international projects. As such, those wanting to delve a bit deeper into such popular topics without too much mathematical detail, but also without oversimplification, should enjoy this survey of extreme objects in the Universe and how we observe and aim to understand them.