![]() ![]() Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. They’re only visible when they’re feeding on stars or gas clouds that stray too close to their boundary, called the event horizon. The researchers published their findings July 28 in the journal Nature.Black holes are aptly named because they usually don't reflect or emit light. Now that the researchers have made this observation, their next steps will be to study in more detail how light bends around black holes and investigate the ways black hole coronas create such bright X-ray flashes. "This magnetic field getting tied up and then snapping close to the black hole heats everything around it and produces these high energy electrons that then go on to produce the X-rays," Wilkins said. The spinning of the black hole causes the combined magnetic field of the coronal plasma to arc high above the black hole and eventually snap, releasing X-rays from the corona as a result. Temperatures in the corona can reach millions of degrees, according to the researchers, turning the cloud of particles into a magnetized plasma as electrons are ripped from atoms. The super-hot cloud, or corona, wraps around the black hole and gets heated up as it falls in. The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics The 12 strangest objects in the universe Stephen Hawking's most far-out ideas about black holes Instead, they hoped to use the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and NASA's NuSTAR space telescopes to peer at the light emitted from the cloud of super-hot particles that forms just outside of the black hole’s point of no return, or event horizon. The astronomers didn't originally intend to confirm Einstein’s theory, formulated more than 100 years ago in 1915. This isn’t the first time that astronomers have spotted a black hole distorting light, called gravitational lensing, but it is the first time that they've seen light echoes from the area behind the black hole. Even though light travels in a straight line, light travelling through a highly curved region of space-time, like the space around a black hole, will also travel in a curve - in this instance from its back to its front. This curved space, in turn, sets the rules for how energy and matter move. Gravity, Einstein discovered, isn’t produced by an unseen force, but is simply our experience of space-time curving and distorting in the presence of matter and energy. "The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself."Įinstein’s theory of general relativity describes how massive objects can warp the fabric of the universe, called space-time. "Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole," Dan Wilkins, a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University, said in a statement. The researchers soon realized that the echoes were arriving from behind the supermassive black hole, which, true to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, was warping space-time - enabling the light to travel around the black hole.
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