Astronomers Stunned To Witness Black Hole Twisting Fabric Of Spacetime

by Aaron Leong — Tuesday, December 23, 2025, 10:09 AM EDT

Astronomers have finally captured a black hole twisting the very fabric of spacetime. This phenomenon, known as frame-dragging or Lense-Thirring precession, confirms a cornerstone of Einstein’s general theory of relativity by showing that massive, rotating objects don’t just spin in situ—they drag it along with them like a spoon stirring honey in a jar.

The discovery comes courtesy of a cataclysmic event located about 400 million light-years away in the LEDA 145386 galaxy. In early 2024, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected a sudden, brilliant flash of light (designated AT2020afhd), but this wasn't a typical supernova; it was a tidal disruption event, i.e. a violent destruction of a star that strayed too close to a supermassive black hole. As the black hole’s gravity shredded the star, the resulting stellar debris formed a glowing accretion disk that spiraled toward the abyss, while powerful jets of matter were launched outward at nearly the speed of light. Thus, astronomers seized the chance to observe this rare event.

black hole wobble trio — *Artist impression depicting the accretion disc surrounding a black hole, in which the inner region of the disc wobbles. (Click to enlarge; Credit NASA)*

As they kept watching, data from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, an international team led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cardiff University noticed a wobble. The X-ray signals coming from the disk and the radio signals from the jets were fluctuating in a rhythmic, synchronized pattern every 19.6 days. This indicated that the entire structure—the disk and the jet—was pressing together like a massive, cosmic spinning top.

According to Einstein’s 1913 predictions (refined by Josef Lense and Hans Thirring in 1918), a rapidly spinning mass creates a gravitomagnetic field. This field forces the surrounding spacetime to rotate, dragging any nearby matter into a swirling vortex. While scientists have long agreed that this so-called frame-dragging effect is mathematically certain and that, so far, the effect has only been seen on a tiny scale with satellites around Earth, seeing it manifest at this scale is unprecedented.

Dr. Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University described the finding as a "gift for physicists," noting that the synchronized wobbling of the disk and jet offers a new way to measure the spin of black holes and understand the mechanics of how they launch matter across galaxies.

Main photo credit: Cardiff University