Astronomers have observed light emanating from behind a black hole for the first time, providing insight into the way it distorts space and affects the path of light.

Finally, astronomers have captured light from behind a supermassive black hole, an event that has never happened before. The discovery proves that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was right once again.

Observing the black hole as it produced X-rays into space, astronomers used the European satellite Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR satellite telescopes. The black hole has a mass of about ten million solar masses and lies in the core of a nearby spiral galaxy called I Zwicky that is 1,800 million light years away.

After seeing a succession of spectacular X-ray flares, something unexpected happened: other flashes, which were smaller, later, and of different ‘colour’ as the first ones. In a study released this week in the journal Nature, the light appeared to be the “echoes” of light that seemed to be X-ray light emanating from beyond the black hole – an unexpected setting for light.

A black hole is a celestial object with such a high gravitational pull that even light cannot be released from it. However, light may bounce, or wrap around the back of a celestial phenomena, so that they can observe it.

“Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole,” lead author Dan Wilkins. “The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself.

”Einstein had thought in 1916 the immense gravity of a black hole might bend light around it, but it has not been proven – until now.

“When astrophysicists began conjecturing about the magnetic field as it might manifest near a black hole fifty years ago, they could not have imagined that one day they would have the tools to watch this play out and witness general theory of relativity,” said Roger Blanford who contributed to the study.

Scientists themselves did not even attempt to verify Einstein’s theory. Initially, they intended to explain the mysteries of the corona, a feature of black holes that emits intense X-radiation. “I’ve been constructing theoretical models of how these echoes seem to me for a few years”, Wilkins avows. For instance, he admits that, “I had 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.

”The current paradigm is that the corona forms out of gas that always falls into the black hole and starts forming a spinning disk around it, akin to water going down a drain; the gas disk is heated to millions of degrees creating a twisted magnetic field that pops, releasing energy and forming the corona.

“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,” Wilkins explained. From here, astronomers also plan to reconstruct the surroundings of the black hole based on the different ‘colors’ observed as the X-ray echoes go round the black hole. They also want to know how the corona can produce such strong flares.

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