Light Coming From Behind Black Hole Observed for the First Time!

 

Today we're discussing black holes once again, another really exciting discovery from another really exciting paper and this time it's actually a discovery that confirms one of the fundamental properties of black holes, the property that they can actually reflect some of the light back to us or in other words that the light around a black hole can bend so much that the black hole itself becomes sort of like a mirror something that was definitely known theoretically but something that has now been physically shown and physically proven through in this recent paper that just came out.

But first what kind of a black hole and where is it located?  well this is in a galaxy pretty far away from us a galaxy that's roughly around 800 million light years away and when observing this galaxy specifically in the x-rays, the scientists realized something about the center of the galaxy. It was producing a very intriguing pattern of different x-ray emissions with very specific light curves being extremely interesting but it didn't take the scientists long to realize that what they're looking at is actually something that was predicted by Einstein many years ago. These were the echoes or the reflections coming from the black hole itself and not just from any part of the black hole from behind the black hole.

 Okay so here's how you could try to imagine this for example today we know that a typical black hole will usually start bending the light in such a specific way that is going to start producing different observable shapes around the black hole itself, so even though this shows us the front of the accretion disk we know that this shows us the back of the accretion disk so this is actually a reflection coming from the other side of the black hole itself but on the bottom we also get to see what the bottom of the disk looks like as well now on top of this. There are some other features specifically the feature known as the photon ring that's theoretically believed to exist here. In a nutshell, though the photon ring in this case reflects the entire universe around the black hole and several versions of these photon rings will produce sort of like the frames individual frames of what I guess you would call the movie of the universe but because various simulations and various mathematical calculations always present the black hole as having this funny looking hat and a kind of a beard sort of important for us to try to figure out if they really look like this so do they actually truly reflect the backside in the way that you see in this image and so obviously theoretically the answer is yes but how do you physically prove this the best picture of the black hole we have so far is M87 but this image is just not accurate enough to truly show us if there are any reflections coming from this region.

The most recent image produced by the same scientists of the Centaurus, a black hole is just not nearly accurate enough to show us anything either but this is what it kind of look alike tells us a little bit more about the astrophysical jets but it tells us nothing about the accretion disk or about the reflections from the blackhole but there is a way for us to see this even though we cannot see the details of a black hole it's something to do with another feature of a black hole that’s actually not visible in this image decades ago the scientists also predicted that the typical black hole is going to have a region known as the corona and generally the way that the corona is produced is when the material from the accretions typical very massive blackhole sort of starts falling into the blackhole producing a huge amount of energy quite suddenly this always results in some sort of a massive and very powerful flare and more often these flares are formed when there is a sudden increase in the mass that's absorbed by the black hole where the sudden increase in gas sliding into the black hole suddenly increases the temperature right next to the black hole by millions of degrees and at these temperatures the electrons start separating from atoms and this creates a huge amount of plasma right above the black hole or actually right above and right below the black hole and all of this plasma gets caught in the magnetic field of the black starts to dramatically get spun up and gets curled and twirled so much that at some point it completely disintegrates creating beautiful and extremely powerful effect with an extremely bright flash

So this extremely powerful Coronal emission followed by an extremely bright flare can actually last for a few hours and the pan on the black hole can actually reach really far up and down from the black hole in this particular case the black hole that was about 10 million masses of the unproduced a flair that was about 60million kilometers in size roughly one third of the distance of earth to the sun but this beautiful flare also produces an extremely bright flash of x-ray radiation the flash that's so bright that it can be visible from an extremely far away distance in this case of course from 800 million light years away from us but at the same time the light from this flash is also reflected from the accretion disk around the black hole and this reflection can also be visible from the planet.

 As a matter of fact, in some of the previous studies, some scientists figured out how we can use this reflection to literally map the region around the black hole. it's not super accurate yet but it's definitely possible and has been done before and so the scientists in this paper were doing something similar but while looking at the x-ray emissions from this particular black hole with this black hole right here being about twice as massive as the one in the middle of the milky way galaxy making it about 30 million kilometers in diameter they realized that they were looking at some other emissions they didn’t really expect the missions that were producing some sort of an echo or a reflection and it didn't take them too long to figure out exactly what's happening here so essentially as the Coronal flash occurs right here it starts emitting x-rays going in every direction some of them will got this side some of them will go to the opposite side but because they're reflected we'll get to see reflections from the near side and since it's a black hole some of the light from the other side will also get bent and sent toward us as well and because these additional flashes were much smaller and also seem to be slightly red-shifted or basically had slightly different color the only reasonable explanation here was that it was reflected from the back of the black hole and we're literally looking at something that came from the other side with the time difference between these flashes naturally also explaining how far away the distance between these two points is although these new x-ray calculations did suggest that the blackhole could have been much smaller possibly only about 3 million masses of the sun which of course means that there are still a lot of unanswered questions nevertheless being able to see all this at such tremendous distances is still quite an impressive achievement but hopefully some of the future telescopes with even more resolution such as for example the Athena observatory that's going to be operational sometime in the next 10 years or so is definitely going to allow the scientists to see all this with so much detail but we might be able to map an entire region around a black hole by using these x-ray echoes coming from a typical x-ray flash and so there are definitely quite a lot of discoveries that are going to be made in the next decade or so for now though it's still quite impressive that this galaxy known as eyes wiki 1 also known as Markarian 1502 allowed the scientists to investigate the black hole in the middle and to confirm something that we sort of expected the black holes to have their ability to bend light in such a way that we can actually see what’s behind them now until future discoveries in regards to black holes or some other observations of the x-ray corona around black holes.