The two bright flares that they observed are only the second example of flares that can be associated with a corona being launched away from a black hole. “This magnetic field getting tied up and then snapping close to the black hole heats everything around it and produces these high-energy electrons that then go on to produce the X-rays,” said Wilkins.įor this project, the researchers trained two space-based X-ray observatories, NASA’s NuSTAR and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, on the galaxy known as I Zwicky 1. Caught up in the powerful spin of the black hole, the magnetic field arcs so high above the black hole, and twirls about itself so much, that it eventually breaks altogether - a situation so reminiscent of what happens around our own Sun that it borrowed the name “corona.” At that temperature, electrons separate from atoms, creating a magnetized plasma. The leading theory for what a corona is starts with gas sliding into the black hole where it superheats to millions of degrees. This light - which is X-ray light - can be analyzed to map and characterize a black hole. Material falling into a supermassive black hole powers the brightest continuous sources of light in the universe, and as it does so, forms a corona around the black hole. The original motivation behind this research was to learn more about a mysterious feature of certain black holes, called a corona. “The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself.” “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,” said Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins, the first author of the new paper who is a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This strong variability turned out to be important for deriving this unprecedented result.”Īccording to theory, the luminous echoes observed were consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole - but even a basic understanding of black holes tells us that is a strange place for light to come from. “Back then, with much more limited X-ray data, my team established that it showed remarkable X-ray properties, including characteristic strong X-ray variability. Willaman Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and professor of physics at Penn State and a member of the research team. “I have been studying the X-ray properties of this remarkable active galaxy since the mid-1990s,” said W. They observed a series of bright flares of X-rays - exciting, but not unprecedented - and then, the telescopes recorded something unexpected: additional flashes of X-rays that were smaller, later, and of different “colors” than the bright flares. Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, the researchers noticed an intriguing pattern. In a paper published July 28 in the journal Nature, a team including a Penn State scientist report recordings of X-ray emissions from the far side of a black hole. Light cannot escape from a black hole, but for the first time ever, researchers have observed light from behind a black hole - a scenario that was predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity but never confirmed, until now.
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