Astronomers have observed a star wobbling in its orbit around a ravenous supermassive black hole that is ripping it apart and feasting on its stellar material. The observation is evidence of a rare and elusive phenomenon called the "Lense-Thirring precession" or "frame dragging," in which a rapidly spinning black hole drags the very fabric of space and time around with its motion.
This swirling of spacetime first emerged from Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity, which predicted that objects with mass "warp" the fabric of space and time (united as a single entity called spacetime) and that gravity arises from this geometric effect. The greater the mass of the object, the larger its impact on spacetime and thus the greater its gravitational influence. In 1918, the concept of massive, rotating objects dragging spacetime along with it was then solidified using general relativity by Austrian physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring.
