A team of astronomers at Stanford University detected light coming from behind a Black Hole. The observations, published yesterday in the magazine Nature, prove the Theory of relativity backed by astrophysicist Albert Einstein, in 1905.
By observing X ray launched by a super massive black hole in a galaxy 800 million light years away from the Terra, the scientist Dan Wilkins, of Stanford, noticed a novelty.
According to the SciTech Daily website, the astrophysicist observed a series of x-ray flashes — exciting but not unprecedented — and the telescopes recorded something rare: additional x-ray flashes that were smaller, later, and different in color from the glare.
According to the theory of relativity, echoes were consistent with rays reflected from behind a black hole. Still, the well-studied understanding of black holes says that the light emanating from that place is strange.
“Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything behind the black hole,” says Wilkins, who is also a scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
“The reason we can see this is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting the magnetic fields around itself,” he explains.
The discovery is the first direct observation of light behind a black hole, something that was predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago but is only now confirmed, according to the website.
“Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists started speculating about how the magnetic field might behave near a black hole, they had no idea that we might one day have the techniques to directly observe it and see Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action,” says Roger Blandford, co-author of the article.
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