Astronomers have made an extraordinary discovery that brings one of Einstein’s lesser-known predictions to life.
For the first time, scientists have observed a swirling distortion in spacetime caused by a rapidly spinning black hole—an effect known as Lense-Thirring precession, or frame-dragging.
The finding, published in Science Advances, offers new insight into the powerful forces that shape the universe.
This unusual effect happens when a black hole spins so fast that it twists the surrounding spacetime, pulling nearby material along with it.
In the same way a spinning top makes the air swirl around it, a rotating black hole can make stars and gas wobble as they orbit.
The team behind the discovery, led by the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, studied an event called AT2020afhd. In this event, a star ventured too close to a supermassive black hole and was torn apart in a violent process known as a tidal disruption event, or TDE.
The remains of the star formed a glowing disk around the black hole, while jets of matter were launched outward at nearly the speed of light.
As the researchers examined the X-ray and radio signals produced during the event, they noticed a strange rhythm.
The disk and the jet were wobbling together, repeating their motion every 20 days. This synchronized wobble pointed directly to frame-dragging—the twisting of spacetime predicted by Einstein more than 100 years ago.
Einstein first described the idea in 1913, and mathematicians Josef Lense and Hans Thirring developed it further in 1918.
Until now, scientists had never observed such a clear example around a black hole. Dr. Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University, a co-author of the study, said the discovery provides the strongest evidence yet that black holes can drag spacetime around them.
He compared the effect to a spinning top pulling water into a whirlpool.
The wobbling signals also offered clues about how black holes behave when they rip apart stars. Most TDEs show steady radio emissions, but AT2020afhd displayed rapid, repetitive changes that could not be explained by normal energy release.
This unusual behavior strengthened the case for frame-dragging, giving scientists a new way to investigate black holes and the extreme environments around them.
To identify the effect, the team combined X-ray data from NASA’s Swift Observatory with radio observations from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.
They analyzed how the light behaved, how the disk was structured, and how matter moved near the black hole. Their results revealed a complex dance shaped by the black hole’s spin, which produces a gravitomagnetic field—similar to how a rotating charged object produces a magnetic field.
Dr. Inserra says the discovery opens the door to studying black hole spin and jet formation in far greater detail. It also serves as a reminder that even today, long after Einstein reshaped our understanding of physics, the universe continues to reveal surprises that confirm his ideas and inspire new scientific questions.
Source: NASA
