I didn’t mean to infer gravity waves..did I say that..sorry if I did.
I’m asking to be educated how do we learn about black holes given their distance and unusual nature
Is it telescopic observance and interpreting electromagnetic radiation only?
Do we get most of this from special orbiting scopes...infrared etc
Does anyone know how many light years out we can make calculations about the properties of what we’re looking at
If they can see it, luminosity, temperature, composition, mass, speed, age, etc., all can be determined (or calculated, if you prefer) -- right out to the edge of the observable universe, 13 billion light years away. Check out this video, and intro to the "distance ladder," . So much of modern astronomy has been made possible by that ladder.
Oh no, it was the article that referenced gravity waves. I wasn't sure that they had been detected at all yet but I guess they have.
I’m asking to be educated how do we learn about black holes given their distance and unusual nature.
45 years ago I was reading a book that was already several years old called "The Universe". I was 10 and read it cover to cover more than once. They had already theorized black holes back then and said "they can't be directly observed by definition but you can observe their effects". Their gravity can be equal to that of a million stars and that affects the motions of the stars in a predictable way. That motion can be measures with surprising resolution using redshift in spectroscopy. Then there are the black holes in the process of eating other stars. As the matter enters the black hole it is accelerated to near the speed of light and it emits crazy powerful high frequency EMR.
Is it telescopic observance and interpreting electromagnetic radiation only?
I'd have to say 99.9999 percent yes it is EMR from radio waves all the way through x-rays. Wiki says the first gravity wave was detected in 2015 and it took a cataclysmic event to be able to detect it. I wouldn't look for any images produces by a gravity wave detector in the near future.
Do we get most of this from special orbiting scopes...infrared etc
That's a big subject as different frequencies of EMR can and can't penetrate the atmosphere and different frequencies tell us a variety of things.
Does anyone know how many light years out we can make calculations about the properties of what we’re looking at
Have you ever heard of a gravity lens? Now that is a fascinating subject. Google some images of them and see. In a nutshell a gravity lens is a cluster of galaxies a hundreds of millions of light years away which has enough gravity to magnify, split or distort the images of galaxies way beyond them. This is just an amazing affect of gravity on EMR.