Light bending and X-ray echoes from behind a supermassive black hole D.R. Wilkins1*, L.C. Gallo2, E. Costantini3,4, W.N. Brandt5,6,7 and R.D. Blandford1 1Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, 452 Lomita Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 2Department of Astronomy & Physics, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS. B3H 3C3, Canada 3SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Sorbonnelaan 2, 3584 CA Utrecht, The Netherlands 4Anton Pannekoeck Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands 5Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 525 Davey Lab, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA 6Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA 7Department of Physics, 104 Davey Lab, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA *Corresponding author. E-mail:
[email protected] Preprint version. Submitted to Nature 14 August 2020, accepted 24 May 2021 The innermost regions of accretion disks around black holes are strongly irradiated by X-rays that are emitted from a highly variable, compact corona, in the immediate vicinity of the black hole [1, 2, 3]. The X-rays that are seen reflected from the disk [4] and the time delays, as variations in the X-ray emission echo or ‘reverberate’ off the disk [5, 6] provide a view of the environment just outside the event horizon. I Zwicky 1 (I Zw 1), is a nearby narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxy [7, 8]. Previous studies of the reverberation of X-rays from its accretion disk revealed that the corona is composed of two components; an extended, slowly varying component over the surface of the inner accretion disk, and a collimated core, with luminosity fluctuations propagating upwards from its base, which dominates the more rapid variability [9, 10].