The discovery of black holes is a story of gradual theoretical development and observational breakthroughs involving many scientists over centuries.

• The earliest theoretical prediction of objects like black holes dates back to 1784 by John Michell, who proposed the idea of "dark stars" so dense that light could not escape their gravity. This concept was further mathematically supported by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1799

• Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915 provided the modern theoretical framework predicting black holes as regions of spacetime with gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape. Shortly after, in 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution to Einstein's equations describing such an object, now known as a black hole

• The term "black hole" itself was coined by physicist John Archibald Wheeler in 1967, helping popularize the concept and bring it into mainstream astrophysics

• Observationally, the first widely accepted black hole discovered was Cygnus X-1, an X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus, identified in 1971 by Paul Murdin and Louise Webster. This discovery provided strong evidence of black holes existing in the universe

• Additional key contributions include Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's work in the 1930s on the mass limits of stars leading to gravitational collapse, and Stephen Hawking's theoretical work in the 1970s revealing black holes emit radiation (Hawking radiation)

In summary, black holes were not discovered by a single person but emerged from a cumulative process involving John Michell’s early ideas, Einstein’s relativity, Schwarzschild’s solutions, Wheeler’s naming, and observational evidence from Murdin and Webster with Cygnus X-1