This is a news item that just came in.
For the first time ever, astronomers have directly detected light from behind a supermassive black hole. The discovery proves Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity was right — again.
This is nonsense: Einstein never believed in black holes and built bridges over singularities in order to avoid them. You can't argue with a concept of what a black hole is when it is not even defined!
Using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and NASA's NuSTAR space telescopes, researchers were observing the black hole as it flung X-rays out into the universe. The black hole is about 10 million times more massive than our sun, and is located in the center of a nearby spiral galaxy called I Zwicky, 1,800 million light-years away from Earth.
After observing a series of bright flares of X-rays, something unprecedented occurred — more flashes that were smaller, later and different "colors" than their predecessors. According to a study published this week in the journal Nature, the "echoes" of light appeared consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole — a very strange place for light to originate.
Black holes' gravitational pulls are so powerful that light cannot escape them. However, light can "echo," wrapping around the back of the celestial phenomenon and allowing astronomers to see it.
Now light, a transverse wave, is said to have properties of sound. The phenomenon is called "whispering gallery" acoustic waves that were studied by Lord Rayleigh. True, such a phenomena has also been found for electromagnetic waves but a confined to waveguides and loss channels.
"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," said lead author Dan Wilkins in a statement. "The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself."
This is double talk if there ever was. First he says black holes don't emit light, and then by warping space, and bending light it can emit light waves!
While Einstein predicted the ability of a black hole's gravity to bend light around it in 1916, it has never been confirmed — until now.
Now this says all. Why should Einstein predict that a black hole should bend light?...and in 1916 of all times. The deflection of light by a massive body (any body!) was predicted by Soldner in 1801. Einstein redid the calculation in 1911 using a variable speed of light. He came out with a value half the size that was later confirmed by the Eddington missions in 1919. But, due to WWI, the deflection measurement could not have been done in 1914 which gave him a breather so he had the time (1915) to revise his earlier calculation using his general theory. The confirmation is bogus.
Researchers observed bright flares of X-ray emissions, produced as gas falls into a supermassive black hole. The flares echoed off of the gas falling into the black hole, and as the flares were subsiding, short flashes of X-rays were seen – corresponding to the reflection of the flares from the far side of the disk, bent around the black hole by its strong gravitational field.DAN WILKINS
"Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about 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," said co-author Roger Blandford.
To say that what they have observed only confirms what Einstein predicted just puts a feather in their caps. The whole idea of light being swallowed up by a black hole is not what the Schwarzschild outer metric predicts. It predicts that at the event horizon, where twice the gravitational potential just balances the rest energy, light slows down to a dead halt. The factor 2 comes from replacing the velocity by the escape velocity. And what the observer will see depends on where he or she is located. Just as magnetic fields disappear to an observer riding on the back of moving charge, the relativistic effects are also dependent on the observer's position and motion.
Researchers weren't even looking to confirm Einstein's theory. They were originally attempting to uncover the mysteries of an odd feature of black holes known as the corona, the source of the bright X-ray light.
What they are referring to are not black holes at all. Gravitational attraction cannot escape from black holes, so what would ever coax them to merge. Bars are well known sources of energy that are found at the centers of spiral galaxies. AGN or Active Galactic Nuclei are also a source of energy, and no one has ever matched them with black holes.
"I've been building theoretical predictions of how these echoes appear to us for a few years," said Wilkins. "I'd 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 prevailing theory is that the corona forms after gas falls continuously into the black hole, forming a spinning disk around it, "like water flushing down a drain." The gas disk is then heated up to millions of degrees, generating a twisted magnetic field that eventually snaps, releasing its energy and producing 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," said Wilkins.
From here, astronomers hope to use the various "colors" observed as the X-ray echoes travel around the black hole to create a 3D map of the black hole surroundings. They also hope to learn how the corona produces such bright flares.
These researchers are completely unarmed when it comes to a theory that they can latch on to. Nothing in general relativity gives even the slightest inkling of the properties of black holes, and to attribute their observations as a confirmation of Einstein's theory is purely ludicrous. Where in 1916 did Einstein discuss the bending of light about a black hole? This is playing on the ignorance of the interested layman.