![]() ![]() It's this phenomenon that allowed Dr Wilkins and his team to detect these X-ray '"echoes" from the other side. ![]() ![]() Some of these escapee X-rays reflect off the back of the accretion disk and are bent around the black hole by its formidable gravity. This occurs when some X-rays manage to slip past the black hole's massive gravitational pull, only to get sucked back in. The team detected fainter bursts of X-rays that had different wavelengths to the larger ones, indicating that they had bounced off the accretion disk from behind the black hole. Using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope, they saw the expected bright X-ray flashes - but there was also something strange going on. Catching hidden lightĭr Wilkins and his team were studying these X-ray flares spewing out from the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy called I Zwicky 1. "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," Dr Wilkins said. ![]() The X-ray flares are generated when the black hole's giant magnetic field gets tangled up in its spin. "When matter falls into these black holes, huge amounts of energy is released, evidence of which is observed on scales far beyond the galaxy itself." ![]()
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