Researchers used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes to locate light behind a black hole that was, reportedly, 10 million times more massive than our own Sun.

• The pull of a black hole is so strong that it is capable of warping the space around it as well. And it’s due to this bizarre phenomenon that astronomers have now caught a glimpse of light behind a black hole

• The researchers were studying the X-ray flares emerging from the supermassive black hole in the I Zwicky 1 spiral galaxy when they noticed the presence of fainter X-ray burst with unexpected wavelengths

• These wavelengths indicated that the light had, in fact, bounced off the black hole’s accretion disk from behind it

Given that nothing escapes a black hole, it would seem to follow that you wouldn’t really see anything behind it. But more than a century ago, renowned physicist Albert Einstein posited that the gravitational force of a black hole could, potentially, be so strong that it may, in fact, bend light around it. And now, a recent study published in Nature appears to have proved him right. For the first time, astronomers have spotted light ‘echoing’ from behind a black hole. 
What are black holes? 
Simply put, black holes are massive stars that have collapsed onto themselves to form an incredibly dense and minuscule object in space-time known as a singularity. The gravitational pull of a singularity is so strong that anything that comes close to it immediately gets sucked into it – including light. However, the pull of a black hole is so strong that it is capable of warping the space around it as well. And it’s due to this bizarre phenomenon that astronomers have now caught a glimpse of light behind a black hole. 
What was the study about? 
Researchers used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes to locate light behind a black hole that was, reportedly, 10 million times more massive than our own Sun, and some 800 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy I Zwicky 1, said a statement from the ESA. 
“The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself,” said Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the study. 
Every black hole has an accretion disk around it made up of gas and dust that swirl around the black hole before being dragged into forever. As this material is absorbed into the black hole, a plume of incredibly hot particles called a corona forms around the black hole, emitting X-ray flares. These flares are shot out when the black hole’s magnetic field gets wrapped up in the singularity’s spin. 
“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,” said Wilkins. 
The researchers were studying the X-ray flares emerging from the supermassive black hole in the I Zwicky 1 spiral galaxy when they noticed the presence of fainter X-ray burst with unexpected wavelengths. These wavelengths indicated that the light had, in fact, bounced off the black hole’s accretion disk from behind it. This can only happen if some X-ray flares make it past the black hole’s gravitational pull before getting dragged back in. These predicted ‘echoes,’ said Wilkins, were what he and his team of researchers had been building models to find. 
(Image Credit: ESA)
“I’d already seen them in the theory I’ve been developing, so once I saw them in the telescope observations, I could figure out the connection,” he said. 
The research team also observed how the X-ray light changed colour as it moved around the rear of the black hole. In doing so, they hope to gain further insight into what takes place at such close distances to these gravitational behemoths. The astronomers are now planning to create a 3-D map of the black hole’s immediate environment, hoping to understand how black hole coronas form and how they produce X-ray flares.