Astronomers have observed matter plunging into the mouth of a black hole at the speed of light, proving a key prediction made by Einstein right, yet again.
"This is the first look at how plasma, peeled from the outer edge of a star, undergoes its final fall into the of a black hole, a process happening in a system around 10,000 light years away," lead author Andrew Mummery, a physicist at Oxford University, said in a statement."What is really exciting is that there are many black holes in the galaxy, and we now have a powerful new technique for using them to study the strongest known gravitational fields.
But this doesn't mean that black holes can't be seen. Active black holes are surrounded by accretion disks — vast plumes of material that is stripped from gas clouds and stars and heated to red-hot temperatures by friction as it spirals into the black holes' mouths. By pointing the two space telescopes at a black hole called MAXI J1820+070, located inside a binary system roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth, the researchers detected X-rays emitted by the scorching material of its accretion disk. Placing their X-ray data into mathematical models, they discovered that the two only matched if the models included light coming from matter in the plunging region — confirming its existence.