Black Hole Bends Escaping Light “Like a Boomerang”
Even light can’t resist the pull of these irresistible cosmic objects.
By Mindy Weisberger | Senior Writer

LIVE SCIENCE – April 24, 2020 | Light escaping from a black hole may “boomerang” its way to freedom, new X-ray images reveal.

(Image: © ESO/L. Calçada)

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.

This illustration shows how some of the light coming from a disk around a black hole is bent back onto the disk itself due to the gravity of the black hole; the light is then reflected back off the disk. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)/R. Connors (Caltech))

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.

Putting a New Spin on Black Holes