Scientists observing a dramatic cosmic outburst have confirmed a prediction first explored in Albert Einstein’s work on relativity more than a century ago.
A global team detected the first clear signs of spacetime twisting around a rapidly spinning black hole, offering rare insight into one of general relativity’s most elusive effects.
Star shredded in deep space
The research centres on AT2020afhd, a tidal disruption event where a supermassive black hole ripped a star apart.
The star’s debris formed a bright disk, while jets of matter shot outward at nearly light speed.
The team tracked rhythmic shifts in radio and X-ray signals from the event. These signals repeated every 20 days and moved in sync, revealing that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together.
That wobble pointed to Lense–Thirring precession, the twisting of spacetime by a spinning black hole.
Dr Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University said the team captured “the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession.”
He said the behaviour fits the long-predicted effect, where a spinning black hole drags spacetime around it in a slow spiral.
Inserra added that the finding also deepens understanding of how a black hole tears a star apart. He said the observations help reveal the conditions inside a tidal disruption event and the forces that shape it.
Unusual signals from the event
The radio signatures stood out from earlier observations of similar events.
Inserra said the signals changed rapidly rather than remaining steady, noting that the team could not tie those variations to the normal energy flows around the black hole.
He said this strengthened their interpretation and pointed to a new way of investigating black hole behaviour.
Inserra described the changing signals as further confirmation of the dragging effect and a promising tool for studying spin and accretion.
To analyse the event, the team combined X-ray data from NASA’s Swift Observatory with radio measurements from the Very Large Array.
They also examined the material near the black hole using spectroscopy to determine its structure and composition.
The combined evidence aligned with theoretical predictions of spacetime being pulled into a wobble.
Window into black hole mechanics
Inserra said the observation reveals how extreme gravity shapes the environment around a spinning black hole.
He compared the effect to a rotating object generating a field, noting that a black hole produces a gravitomagnetic pull that influences nearby stars and matter.
He used a small part of the original analogy, describing the detection as a reminder of the complex forces at work in deep space.
The discovery, he said, underscores how much remains to be uncovered as scientists continue to track these rare cosmic events.
Inserra added that the finding highlights the range of extraordinary objects still waiting to be identified.
He said the result reflects the growing ability of astronomers to observe the universe in detail and recognise the many “variations and flavours that nature has produced.”
The observation also completes a long arc in modern physics, offering real-world confirmation for concepts first sketched in Einstein‘s early work and now illuminated by one of the most destructive events in the cosmos.