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Scientists have detected light echoing from behind a black hole for the first time. Caspar/Pixabay
If you know what a black hole is, you're probably aware that it can contain as much mass as billions of stars, compressed into a much smaller space, and have such a powerful gravitational pull that even light can't escape its grasp.
But even though it's not possible to see into a black hole, it is possible to see light that's coming from
behind one. In a paper published July 28, 2021, in the scientific journal Nature, researchers from Stanford University, Penn State University and Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) describe the first-ever observation of light apparently being emitted from the far side of a supermassive black hole located in I Zwicky 1, a galaxy 800 million light-years away from Earth.