From Wikipedia:
Objects orbiting black holes probe the gravitational field around the central object. An early example, discovered in the 1970s, is the accretion disk orbiting the putative black hole responsible for Cygnus X-1, a famous X-ray source. While the material itself cannot be seen directly, the X rays flicker on a millisecond time scale, as expected for hot clumpy material orbiting a ~10 solar-mass black hole just prior to accretion. The X-ray spectrum exhibits the characteristic shape expected for a disk of orbiting relativistic material, with an iron line, emitted at ~6.4 keV, broadened to the red (on the receding side of the disk) and to the blue (on the approaching side).

History from Wikipedia

The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was put forward by geologist John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 to the Royal Society:
—John Michell[3]
In 1796, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions).[4][5] Such "dark stars" were largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since light was then thought to be a massless wave and therefore not influenced by gravity. Unlike the modern black hole concept, the object behind the horizon is assumed to be stable against collapse.

In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does in fact influence light's motion. A few months later, Karl Schwarzschild gave the solution for the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass,[6] showing that a black hole could theoretically exist. The Schwarzschild radius is now known to be the radius of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole, but this was not well understood at that time, for example Schwarzschild himself thought it was not physical. Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution for the point mass a few months after Schwarzschild and wrote more extensively about its properties.

In 1930, astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated using general relativity that a non-rotating body above 1.44 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar limit) would collapse. His arguments were opposed by Arthur Eddington, who believed that something would inevitably stop the collapse. Eddington was partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that stars above approximately three solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) would collapse into black holes for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar.[7]

Oppenheimer and his co-authors used Schwarzschild's system of coordinates (the only coordinates available in 1939), which produced mathematical singularities at the Schwarzschild radius, in other words some of the terms in the equations became infinite at the Schwartschild radius. This was interpreted as indicating that the Schwarzschild radius was the boundary of a bubble in which time stopped. This is a valid point of view for external observers, but not for infalling observers.

Because of this property, the collapsed stars were briefly known as "frozen stars,"[citation needed] because an outside observer would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant where its collapse takes it inside the Schwarzschild radius. This is a known property of modern black holes, but it must be emphasized that the light from the surface of the frozen star becomes redshifted very fast, turning the black hole black very quickly. Many physicists could not accept the idea of time standing still at the Schwarzschild radius, and there was little interest in the subject for over 20 years.

In 1958, David Finkelstein introduced the concept of the event horizon by presenting Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates, which enabled him to show that "The Schwarzschild surface r = 2 m is not a singularity, but that it acts as a perfect unidirectional membrane: causal influences can cross it in only one direction".[8] This did not strictly contradict Oppenheimer's results, but extended them to include the point of view of infalling observers. All theories up to this point, including Finkelstein's, covered only non-rotating black holes.

In 1963, Roy Kerr found the exact solution for a rotating black hole. The rotating singularity of this solution was a ring, and not a point. A short while later, Roger Penrose was able to prove that singularities occur inside any black hole.

In 1967, astronomers discovered pulsars,[9] [10] and within a few years could show that the known pulsars were rapidly rotating neutron stars. Until that time, neutron stars were also regarded as just theoretical curiosities. So the discovery of pulsars awakened interest in all types of ultra-dense objects that might be formed by gravitational collapse.

Physicist John Wheeler is widely credited with coining the term black hole in his 1967 public lecture Our Universe: the Known and Unknown, as an alternative to the more cumbersome "gravitationally completely collapsed star." However, Wheeler insisted that someone else at the conference had coined the term and he had merely adopted it as useful shorthand. The term was also cited in a 1964 letter by Anne Ewing to the AAAS:

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as mass is added to a degenerate star a sudden collapse will take place and the intense gravitational field of the star will close in on itself. Such a star then forms a "black hole" in the universe.