A black hole was spotted seemingly breaking the laws of physics, before it became clear that what astrophysicists were seeing was an optical illusion.

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Per Vice , the phenomena was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope – the same one responsible for capturing the first ever image of a black hole last year thanks to algorithms developed by Katie Bouman and her team . What scientists observed in this case was a beam of energy coming from the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy called 3C 279. That beam of energy appeared to be travelling at up to 20 times the speed of light.The speed of light is supposed to be a universal speed limit, and it's impossible to provide moving particles of conventional matter with the energy required to travel any faster than this. This is because a particle's mass increases in proportion to its velocity and requires a proportional amount of energy to accelerate. A particle travelling beyond light speed would need infinite energy due to its subsequent infinite mass, which is why this energy beam observation is so strange.The observational team, led by astrophysicist Jae-Young Kim, posted a study that explained this impossible vision was actually the cause of a mega-scale optical illusion. While the jet does reach speeds of a less law breaking 99.5% of the speed of light, it only looks like it was travelling at 15 - 20 times faster because of how it's oriented with the Earth.Co-author Dom Pesce, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also explained the illusion in this statement , saying, “This extraordinary optical illusion arises because the material is racing toward us, chasing down the very light it is emitting and making it appear to be moving faster than it is.”Despite the optical illusion not breaking the laws of physics, scientists still learned some interesting things from their observations. Thanks to The Event Horizon Telescope's ability to observe distant objects in much greater detail than previously possible, they could see that the beam looks twisted where it emanates from the centre of the black hole. This could mean the beam is being distorted or deformed at the centre of the black hole, due to the contrast with the straighter beams further from the middle. That observation could help scientists understand how these jets of energy are formed.For more on black holes, NASA's new simulation is also looking into how black holes can warp space time . A supermassive black hole has also recently been discovered to be responsible for the biggest explosion ever detected

Hope Corrigan is an Australian freelance writer for IGN who also only ever looks like she's breaking the law. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram