10 issue of the journal Nature.įollow Charles Q. They also detail their findings (opens in new tab) in the Jan. 9 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
BLACK HOLE ACCRETION DISK XRAY DRIVER
Although supermassive black holes "are 1,000 times less massive than the galaxies in which they reside, they actually are a main driver in the evolution of the galaxies," she noted. These new findings might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes such as MAXI J1820+070, but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, which are thought to lurk at the hearts of virtually every large galaxy, Kara said. One possibility is that it contracted because of the extraordinary pressure from the avalanche of matter falling into the black hole from the accretion disk, study co-author Jack Steiner, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.
It remains uncertain why the corona shrank. Steiner says some of these photons can scatter 'out to infinity. Scientists have previously observed that X-ray photons emitted by the accretion disk can ping-pong off high-energy electrons in a black holes corona. "In this work, we show clear evidence that it is the corona that drives the evolution." X-ray echoes - The black hole detected on March 11 was named MAXI J1820+070, for the instrument that detected it. Is it driven by the disk moving inwards or by the corona changing?" Kara said. "There has been much debate in the community for many years as to what drives the evolution of the outburst in stellar-mass black holes. Instead, they estimated the corona shrank dramatically after the outburst, from an initial size of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) to just 6 miles (10 km), in a little more than a month. The scientists found the accretion disk changed little in size during the outburst. We model the disk, corona, and reflection components of X-ray spectra taken with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, using the relxill suite of reflection models. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) We explore the accretion properties of the black hole X-ray binary XTE J1550564 during its outbursts in 1998/. An artist’s illustration of the NICER mission aboard the International Space Station.