Studying the universe and the galaxies is no easy feat. Sometimes, the simplest of movements within the atmosphere become the biggest discoveries, which is why you need to be extra observant. Something as small as noticing faint X-rays transform into even fainter X-rays – even for a very short period of time – can be huge, just ask astrophysicist Dan Wilkins.
Wilkins happened to have his telescopes fastened precisely on the supermassive blackhole that sits right at the center of the I Zwicky galaxy when it suddenly did something unexpected. Normally, there is a usual series of impressive X-rays that are flung out from the center of the blackhole, but suddenly there were additional flashes of X-rays that came out, smaller and sometime later, even showed different “colors.”
And what he was actually seeing was going to be yet another reason astronomers get to say one of their favorite saying, Einstein was right.
Notably, the fainter and “colored” lights – which came out from behind the black hole – due to the immense burst of X-rays that were reflected off the gasses that were orbiting the black hole. They were then ‘drawn around by the magnetic and gravitational forces that blend space and time,’ which is what allowed the astronomers to see them “faintly.”
Wilkins, who happens to be a research scientist at the Kavil Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford shared in a statement, “Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole. The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light, and twisting magnetic fields around itself.”
It was the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes that were used to make the discovery, capturing the entire phenomenon in stages. These stages were shown on the ESA website for people to easily understand them.
The humongous black hole found at the center of the I Zwicky sits at 10 million times the mass of the Earth’s sun. It’s also 1,800 light-years away from the solar system while being surrounded by a ‘swirling cloud of gas and dust that is continuously being pulled into the black hole,’ which is called a corona, appearing to be like how water looks as it descends down a drain.
According to a report on the ESA website, this corona happens to get heated up to millions of degrees Kelvin as it spins in circles, which is what creates the displaced magnetic fields that end up “twisted into knots” that eventually snap.
When the snapping occurs, it causes ‘a massive explosion of heat and energy.’ This creates incredible bursts of X-rays which are known as “flares,” lasting for up to two and a half hours at times.
Wilkins observed that during one of these particular X-ray discharges that there was a light ‘reflecting off the gas on the opposite side of the black hole from where the telescopes were viewing it.’ What they also discovered was that it was the bending of space and time around the black hole that also changed the X-rays’ properties and colors.
It was during the discovery of seeing the light in a variety of colors from the opposite ends of the black hole that compelled Wilkins and his research team to consider the possibility of using them to make ‘a color-coded 3D map of a black hole and its surroundings.’
A CBS report shared how Einstein had predicted back in 1916 that black holes could actually bend light. And when the “Gate of Hell” image appeared in 2019, which was the first photo of an actual black hole, alongside the 2015 discovery of the gravitational waves using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) which won a Nobel Prize, as well as detecting the fact that new-born black holes actually “ring,” just prove that Einstein was right all along. Even 50 years after his death, he is still proving why he was the most distinguished astrophysicists that ever lived.
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