Astronomers recently saw something they'd never seen before while peering at a black hole some 800 million light-years away: X-ray light emissions coming from directly behind the black hole at the center of a distant galaxy.

The findings were reported in a new study published Wednesday in the British journal Nature.

"Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole,” study lead author Dan Wilkins of Stanford University said in a statement.