Black hole bends escaping light 'like a boomerang' By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer a day ago Ev
By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer a day ago
Even light can't resist the pull of these irresistible cosmic objects.
(Image: © ESO/L. Calçada)
Light escaping from a black hole may "boomerang" its way to freedom, new X-ray images reveal.
Researchers found this odd behavior while reviewing archival X-ray observations of a black hole that's approximately 10 times as massive as our sun. Located about 17,000 light-years from Earth, the black hole siphons material from a partner star; together, the black hole and star are known as XTE J1550-564.
Things can get pretty weird around a black hole. These exceptionally dense cosmic objects exert such a powerful gravitational pull that even light can't resist their attraction. And scientists recently found that light behaves even more strangely around a black hole than once thought. Light in a black hole's accretion disk — a spiraling, flattened cloud of dust and gas that circles the edges of a black hole — can sometimes escape into space. But the departing light from the XTE J1550-564 black hole didn't follow the predictable path. Instead of escaping directly from the disk, the light was instead pulled back toward the black hole and then reflected off the disk and away from the black hole "like a boomerang," researchers reported in a new study.
They modeled the black hole's accretion disk and its corona — a lower-density gas zone very close to the black hole — using data captured by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a now-defunct NASA satellite mission that investigated black holes, neutron stars and other X-ray emitting objects between 1995 and 2012.
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