Mysterious black hole looks like it is emitting light: ‘We were very surprised’

Scientists are puzzled by a new type of black hole that has light emerging from its dark spot and said that it could actually be a new kind of cosmic entity.

The mysterious cosmic object is a theoretical construction that has emerged from a computer model simulation suggesting there could be celestial bodies in space hiding from even the best telescopes on Earth.

“We were very surprised... The object looks identical to a black hole, but there’s light coming out from its dark spot,” Pierre Heidmann, who led the research from Johns Hopkins University in the US, said in a statement.

Researchers described the object that they call a “topological soliton” in a new study yet to be published in the journal Physical Review D.

The possibility of other objects in space that could be passing off as black holes with similar gravitational effects when observed with ultraprecise sensors on Earth was explored by scientists.

Black holes are collapsed stars with a gravitational field so intense even light cannot escape their pull.

The detection of gravitational waves in 2015 came as a breakthrough in the astrophysics world, confirming the existence of black holes.

It showed that light orbits around blackholes at a certain distance from its centre – the same way Earth orbits the sun.

This distance determines the edge of the black hole’s “shadow” so that any incoming light will fatally hit the region that scientists call the “event horizon”.

The topological soliton, on the other hand, distorts space exactly like a black hole does, but does not behave like one as well, scientists said.

In the simulation, it was found to scramble and release weak light rays that would not escape the strong gravitational force if it were a “true” black hole.

In several scenarios using pictures of outer space, researchers placed a black hole and the topological soliton in front of the lens as if they had been captured with a camera.

In simulations, both the cosmic entities produced distorted pictures because of their gravitational effects, but the soliton was found to behave differently.

“Light is strongly bent, but instead of being absorbed like it would in a black hole, it scatters in funky motions until at one point it comes back to you in a chaotic manner,” Dr Heidmann said.

“You don’t see a dark spot. You see a lot of blur, which means light is orbiting like crazy around this weird object,” he said.

Researchers said while the study is not a prediction of new objects in space, it can serve as the best model of what such objects could look like compared to black holes.

While the object is still theoritical, the fact that scientists could construct it using mathematical equations and show what it looks like using simulations, suggests there could be celestial bodies hiding from even the best telescopes on Earth.

“How would you tell when you don’t have a black hole? We don’t have a good way to test that. Studying hypothetical objects like topological solitons will help us figure that out as well,” said Ibrahima Bah, another author of the study.