Astronomers have made the first-ever detection of light coming from behind a black hole in space. The discovery was published in a paper in the journal Nature on July 28th.
Scientists studied X-ray light emitted from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy located 800 million light-years away from Earth. This light is a normal feature and is called the black hole’s corona. However, to their surprise, astronomers also detected additional beams of light.
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These beams were smaller, delayed, and had different colors compared to the light from the black hole’s corona. These characteristics suggest that they could be coming from behind the black hole. “Light cannot escape if it goes into a black hole.
Therefore, we should not be able to see anything behind the black hole,” said Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist from Stanford University and the lead author of the study, in a press release.
“However, we can observe that light because the black hole is curved spacetime. It bends light and twists magnetic fields around itself,” Wilkins explained the discovery. Essentially, the gravitational force from black holes bends the light rays around them, allowing scientists to have a first glimpse of what lies beyond the black hole.
This discovery confirms Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein’s theory had predicted the possibility of seeing light from behind a black hole.
However, before the publication of this study, astronomers had not directly observed this phenomenon. “50 years ago, astrophysicists began speculating how magnetic fields would operate near black holes.
They did not know that one day we would have the technology to directly observe and witness the workings of Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” said Roger Blandford, a co-author of the study.