X-ray 'Echoes' Probe Habitat
of Monster Black Hole

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    ID: 12854 Produced Video

    NICER Charts the Area Around a New Black Hole

    Jan. 30th, 2019
    (updated May 3rd, 2023)

    Watch how X-ray echoes, mapped by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) revealed changes to the corona of black hole MAXI J1820+070.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Superluminal" from Killer TracksComplete transcript available. || Scientists have mapped the environment surrounding a black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) payload aboard the International Space Station. NICER detected X-ray light from a recently discovered black hole, called MAXI J1820+070 (J1820 for short), as it consumed material from a companion star. Waves of X-rays formed "light echoes" that reflected off the swirling gas near the black hole and revealed changes in the environment’s size and shape. A black hole can siphon gas from a nearby star and into a ring of material called an accretion disk that glows in X-rays. Above this disk is the corona, a region of subatomic particles that glows in higher-energy X-rays. Astrophysicists want to better understand how the inner edge of the accretion disk and the corona change in size and shape as a black hole accretes material from its companion star. If they can understand how and why these changes occur in stellar-mass black holes over a period of weeks, they could shed light on how supermassive black holes evolve over millions of years and how they affect the galaxies in which they reside. One method used to chart those changes is called X-ray reverberation mapping, which uses X-ray reflections in much the same way sonar uses sound waves to map undersea terrain. From 10,000 light-years away, the scientists estimated that the corona contracted vertically from roughly 100 to 10 miles — that’s like seeing something the size of a blueberry shrink to something the size of a poppy seed at the distance of Pluto. ||

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  • 
    ID: 11482 Produced Video

    The Cloudy Cores of Active Galaxies

    Feb. 19th, 2014
    (updated May 3rd, 2023)

    At the hearts of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, there lurks a supermassive black hole weighing millions to billions of times the sun's mass. As gas falls toward a supermassive black hole, it gathers into a so-called accretion disk and becomes compressed and heated, ultimately emitting X-rays. The centers of some galaxies produce unusually powerful emission that exceeds the sun's energy output by billions of times. These are active galactic nuclei, or AGN.Using data from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, an international team has uncovered a dozen instances where X-ray signals from active galaxies dimmed as a result of a cloud of gas moving across our line of sight. The new study triples the number of cloud events previously identified in the 16-year archive.The study is the first statistical survey of the environments around supermassive black holes and is the longest-running AGN-monitoring study yet performed in X-rays. Scientists determined various properties of the occulting clouds, which vary in size and shape but average 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km) across – greater than Pluto's distance from the sun — and twice the mass of Earth. They orbit a few light-weeks to a few light-years from the black hole. ||

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