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Albert Einstein described black holes as strange objects “where God divided by zero.” An international team of astrophysicists has now confirmed that black holes are a distinct “species” from neutron stars –comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface, unlike black holes, an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that do not have a surface, and are confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Hidden in NASA Archival X-ray Data

Definitive proof of the existence of such objects, “a holy grail of modern physics and astronomy,’ reports the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has been achieved by an international team who revealed by far the strongest steady signature of stellar-mass black holes to date. Using the archival X-ray data from the now decommissioned astronomy satellite Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, that probed the extreme environments around white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, the team identified the effect of the lack of hard surface on the observed X-ray emission, and thus have found an extremely strong signature of accreting stellar-mass black holes.