Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery about black holes that amazed even seasoned astronomers.
And their discovery appears to prove that Albert Einstein was right about how these mysterious celestial bodies behave.
Black holes continue to startle scientists, their gravity so powerful that light gets sucked in and can never escape.
According to the MIT Technology Review, even at 800 million light years away, orbiting telescopes have been able to detect X-ray spectrum light from the front side, but never from the back side.
So far, astrophysicists have only ever been able to see light and other radiation from a black hole when it is glowing directly toward our telescopes, MITTR said.
The discovery confirms Einstein's 1916 theory on general relativity, according to The Guardian.
Black holes are born when a supermassive star explodes in a supernova and then collapses in on itself.
The gravitational pull from black holes essentially "bends" light rays around themselves, giving scientists their first glimpse of what lies behind.
"Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists began to speculate how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," Roger Blandford, one of the co-authors of an international team of researchers, said.
Einstein's work affirmed it should be possible to see light waves emitted from the far side of a black hole because of the distorted magnetic fields acting as a mirror, The Telegraph said.
Two aging telescopes helped with the discovery: the 22-year-old XMM-Newton Telescope at the European Space Agency, and the 9-year-old NuSTAR at NASA.
"It's a key part of the puzzle to understanding how the galaxies formed and how the universe as we know it became how it is," Dr. Wilkins, a research scientist at Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford, said in quotes by ABC7 News.
