Black Holes

have black holes actually been proven to exist? when i was a kid i was all into astronomy and recently i've been looking into it again, and after reading several articles on the subject im still kinda in the dark. if you say wiki black holes there's tons of inferential information about them existing but no references to actual known black holes. also I just read some random post on /b/ (lol, reliable information) saying "as science has proven a blackhole is impossible (NASA news 2006) " <- anyone know wtf article he's referring to.

so tl;dr, blackholes: definately out there or an interesting theory?

From Wikipedia:

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape after having fallen past the event horizon. The name comes from the fact that even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) is unable to escape, rendering the interior invisible. However, black holes can be detected if they interact with matter outside the event horizon, for example by drawing in gas from an orbiting star. The gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation in the process.

While the idea of an object with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping was proposed in the 18th century, black holes as presently understood are described by Einstein's theory of general relativity, developed in 1916. This theory predicts that when a large enough amount of mass is present within a sufficiently small region of space, all paths through space are warped inwards towards the center of the volume, forcing all matter and radiation to fall inward.

Short Version:

Black holes are created when a massive star dies and collapses into itself.