Study Proves Black Holes Have A "Plunging Region" As Einstein Said

Albert Einstein was right, Jacopo Prisco reported for CNN, as there is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity.

This is not the first time that black holes have helped confirm Einstein’s grand theory, known as general relativity.

Using telescopes capable of detecting X-rays, astronomers have for the first time observed this area — called the “plunging region” — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth.

“We’ve been ignoring this region because we didn’t have the data,” said Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“But now that we do, we couldn’t explain it any other way.”

It’s not the first time that black holes have helped confirm Einstein’s grand theory, known as general relativity.

The first photo of a black hole in 2019 had previously strengthened the revolutionary physicist’s core assumption that gravity is just matter bending the space-time fabric.

Einstein’s other predictions have turned out to be correct over the years, among them gravitational waves and the universal speed limit. “He’s a tough man to bet against at this point,” said Mummery, a Leverhulme-Peierls Fellow in the department of physics at the University of Oxford in the UK.