Try looking at a black object that's 50 million light years from Earth, then describe what you see.

If you said "nothing," then you understand the first problem with studying black holes.

They might be some of the most powerful objects in the universe, but viewing them is well, kind of a let down.

To understand how they work, scientists instead have to look at the space near black holes, at other objects, energies and magnetic fields that are influenced by them.

"We believe most galaxies have black holes in the center," said Bill Junor, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Black holes might be very important in the evolution of any galaxy, but there's still a lot of mystery about them, about how they work."

Junor and astronomers at the Very Long Baseline Array, a massive radio telescope operated out of Socorro, recently saw a phenomenon near a very large black hole that could help them understand a bit more about their inner workings. The VLBA is a system of 10 radio telescope antennas that stretch from Hawaii to the Caribbean. The antennas work in concert and create resolving power equal to the ability to read a newspaper in New York while standing in Los Angeles.

Scientists from LANL and the VLBA published a paper on their findings in the July 2 online edition of the journal Science.

A black hole is generally defined as a concentration of matter so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational pull. Scientists think that as surrounding material falls into a black hole, it forms an immense swirling disk around the black hole with intense magnetic fields.

"The environment around a black hole must be very strange," Junor said. "You're very close to the center of an intense gravitational field, and not only that but you've got very hot matter falling into this gravitational well or hole. That area is much much hotter than the sun."

It's certainly not a place where humans would be very comfortable, he added.

"You wouldn't last long there," Junor said. "And a normal adult would weigh bazillions of tons."

He paused, then laughed.

"That's a very technical number, by the way," he said.

Junor works at the gamma ray observatory at the lab, which can see very high energy materials, or photons, in space, although it's not all that good at telling exactly where those materials come from.

While observing galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light years from Earth and is thought to have a supermassive black hole at the center, Junor and other gamma ray scientists caught a huge flare, he said.

"This is a gentle ramping up of gamma ray emissions over a few days, which is different than a gamma ray burst," Junor said. "Bursts happen over a few seconds and are related to supernovas."

As the gamma ray scientists were looking at the flare, they contacted the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, which runs the VLBA. And they found out the radio astronomers could detect the same thing, through radio waves that followed shortly after the gamma rays arrived.

"The advantage of radio astronomy is that they can see exactly where the gamma emission came from," Junor said. "And so what they found was that the flare we saw wasn't coming from something on the outside of this galaxy, like we thought, or from strings intersecting or some other phenomenon. They were coming from a region very close to this black hole."

Unlike the gamma ray flare, though, the radio flare lasted about two months, giving scientists more time to pinpoint the location, said Craig Walker, a scientist at NRAO.

"This tells us that energetic material busts out very close to the black hole, causing the gamma rays to be emitted and the radio flare to begin," Walker said. "As that material traveled down the jet, expanding and losing energy, the gamma ray emission ceased, but the radio continued to increase in brightness. The VLBA showed us with great precision where the radio emission came from."

The finding might sound a bit esoteric, but what it means is that the region near black holes, which is also the region near the center of any galaxy, could be a lot hotter than scientists previously thought, Junor said.

"It gives us a little bit of a better understanding of how a black hole engine works," Junor said. "It's kind of like a water drain, material swirls around and doesn't go straight down. That swirling can create very hot temperatures, so the emanation of gamma rays told us that it's even hotter near a black hole than we thought before."

The finding also rules out some stranger theories about the centers of galaxies being cool, and confirms that they are very hot places, Junor said.

And to some extent, observing the phenomenon at the same time that the VLBA scientists were looking at it came down to a lucky break, he said.

"So what's next? Perhaps we should have a more organized observing campaign of this galaxy and perhaps other galaxies with black holes at the center so we can learn even more," Junor said.

Every little piece of information helps, and there's still a great deal we don't know about the mysterious forces at the center of galaxies, from M87 to our own, he said.

"What we would really like to know about black holes, which is something very hard to find, is how fast are they spinning," Junor said. "We suspect they're spinning very fast, but we just don't know for sure."

Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.