Echoes of light bouncing off thick clouds of material around active black holes are helping astronomers better understand the wacky space-time in the immediate vicinity of these extreme objects.
. That's because, unless they're active, they don't emit any radiation we can detect. They're effectively invisible.
The material forms an accretion disk of dust and gas swirling around the black hole and falling into it, a lot like water circling and sliding down a drain. The insane frictional and gravitational interactions involved generate intense heat and light, causing the region around the black hole to glow.In rare black holes, we can also see a fascinating phenomenon at work.
Although rare, these echoes can tell us a lot about the environment around a black hole. The light can be analyzed, from both the initial outburst and the echo, to measure the space between the black hole and the dust, much like a bat uses echolocation to navigate its surroundings. First, the black hole starts off in a"hard" state, generating a corona and emitting high-speed jets of plasma from the regions over its poles. When these processes are dominating the black hole's energy profile, the time intervals between the X-ray bursts and their echoes are short, on the scale of milliseconds.
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