'Black holes deform space & time'

John Miller, of Harvard University's astrophisical center at Boston, Massachusetts, was able to see gas particles literally "surfing" a space-time wave around a black hole known as GRS 1915+105, some 40,000 light years away in the Aquila constellation.

His observations have confirmed a key theory that nothing is able to escape a black hole's extreme gravitational field, not even light waves, Miller told reporters.

The data shows that "black holes are such extreme objects that they can actually warp and drag the fabric of spacetime around with them as they spin," the scientists reported.

"Gas whipping around the black hole has no choice but to ride that wave of choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole," they added.

The space-time warp caused by extreme gravity was predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity, said Miller, who did his reasearch with Jeroen Homan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They made their observations with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Rossi-X Timing Explorer satellite, the most powerful orbiting X-ray telescope.