paradoxically they can also be the brightest things in the universe before any sort of matter disappears forever into a black hole theorists surmise it would be accelerated to nearlight speeds by the holes gravitational field and heated swirling to millions of degrees this would spark xray flashes generate interstellar shock waves and squeeze highenergy jets and particles across space like so much toothpaste from a tubein one common scenario a black hole exists in a binary system with a star and steals material from it which accretes into a dense bright disk a visible doughnut of doom that sporadically produces xray outburstsusing data from a nasa instrument called the neutron star interior composition explorer nicer a group led by jingyi wang an mit graduate student sought echoes or reflections of these xray blasts the time delay between the original xray blasts and their echoes and distortions caused by their nearness to the weird gravity of black holes offered insight into the evolution of these violent burstsmeanwhile dr kara has been working with education and music experts to convert the xray reflections into audible sound in some simulations of this process she said the flashes go all the way around the black hole generating a telltale shift in their wavelengths before being reflectedi just love that we can hear the general relativity in these simulations dr kara said in an emaileat your hearts out pink floyd