January 3, 2026
Astronomers have finally caught a spinning black hole in the act of twisting the fabric of spacetime itself. The discovery came from watching a distant star get torn apart, forming a glowing disk and powerful jets that began to wobble together in a steady rhythm. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Astronomers have seen spacetime itself wobble near a spinning black hole for the first time. The discovery, revealed during a star’s destruction, confirms a major prediction of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The universe has delivered a rare breakthrough for scientists who have been hunting one of the most difficult effects to observe in the cosmos.
In research published in Science Advances, astronomers report the first direct detection of a swirling distortion in spacetime produced by a fast-spinning black hole.
First direct view of black hole frame dragging
The phenomenon is called Lense-Thirring precession, also known as frame-dragging. It describes how a rotating black hole twists the spacetime around it, pulling nearby matter along and causing the paths of stars and gas to slowly wobble.
The research team was led by the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with support from Cardiff University. They focused on an object known as AT2020afhd, a tidal disruption event (TDE) in which a star was destroyed after wandering too close to a supermassive black hole.
Star Wobbling Around Black Hole
An artist’s impression depicts the accretion disc surrounding a black hole, in which the inner region of the disc wobbles. In this context, the wobble refers to the orbit of material surrounding the black hole changing orientation around the central object. Credit: NASA
A star torn apart reveals a spinning disk and jets
As the star was ripped apart, its debris settled into a rapidly rotating disk around the black hole. At the same time, powerful jets of material were launched outward at close to the speed of light.
By studying repeating patterns in X-ray and radio signals from this event, the scientists found that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together. This coordinated motion repeated every 20 days, providing a clear signature of the spacetime twisting effect.
A century-old prediction confirmed
The idea behind this effect was first proposed by Einstein in 1913 and later described mathematically by Lense and Thirring in 1918. These new observations confirm a key prediction of general relativity and give researchers a new way to investigate black hole spin, how matter falls into black holes, and how jets are launched.
Dr. Cosimo Inserra, a Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University and one of the paper’s co-authors, said: “Our study shows the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession – a black hole dragging space time along with it in much the same way that a spinning top might drag the water around it in a whirlpool.
“This is a real gift for physicists as we confirm predictions made more than a century ago. Not only that, but these observations also tell us more about the nature of TDEs – when a star is shredded by the immense gravitational forces exerted by a black hole.
“Unlike previous TDEs studied, which have steady radio signals, the signal for AT2020afhd showed short-term changes, which we were unable to attribute to the energy release from the black hole and its surrounding components. This further confirmed the dragging effect in our minds and offers scientists a new method for probing black holes.”
How telescopes uncovered the effect
To detect the frame-dragging signal, the team analyzed X-ray observations from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (Swift) and radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).
They also studied the makeup and behavior of the surrounding material using electromagnetic spectroscopy. This helped them identify the structure and properties of the matter involved and confirm the underlying physical process.
“By showing that a black hole can drag space time and create this frame-dragging effect, we are also beginning to understand the mechanics of the process,” explains Dr. Inserra.
“So, in the same way a charged object creates a magnetic field when it rotates, we’re seeing how a massive spinning object – in this case a black hole – generates a gravitomagnetic field that influences the motion of stars and other cosmic objects nearby.
“It’s a reminder to us, especially during the festive season as we gaze up at the night sky in wonder, that we have within our grasp the opportunity to identify ever more extraordinary objects in all the variations and flavors that nature has produced.”
Reference: “Detection of disk-jet coprecession in a tidal disruption event” by Yanan Wang, Zikun Lin, Linhui Wu, Wei-Hua Lei, Shuyuan Wei, Shuang-Nan Zhang, Long Ji, Santiago del Palacio, Ranieri D. Baldi, Yang Huang, Ji-Feng Liu, Bing Zhang, Aiyuan Yang, Ru-Rong Chen, Yangwei Zhang, Ai-Ling Wang, Lei Yang, Panos Charalampopoulos, David R. A. Williams-Baldwin, Zhu-Heng Yao, Fu-Guo Xie, Defu Bu, Hua Feng, Xinwu Cao, Hongzhou Wu, Wenxiong Li, Erlin Qiao, Giorgos Leloudas, Joseph P. Anderson, Xinwen Shu, Dheeraj R. Pasham, Hu Zou, Matt Nicholl, Thomas Wevers, Tomás E. Müller-Bravo, Jing Wang, Jian-Yan Wei, Yu-Lei Qiu, Wei-Jian Guo, Claudia P. Gutiérrez, Mariusz Gromadzki, Cosimo Inserra, Lydia Makrygianni, Francesca Onori, Tanja Petrushevska, Diego Altamirano, Lluís Galbany, Miguel Peréz-Torres and Ting-Wan Chen, 10 December 2025, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady9068
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