![]() As NICER watched the eruption, the time between echoes became shorter and shorter, indicating the distance between the disk and corona was shrinking. Other light comes out of the corona and bounces off this disk, arriving at the NICER detectors later. Farther out and perpendicular to the corona is the “accretion disk”-a wider pancake of gas swirling around the hole and falling into it. Some light travels straight from a region called the corona, made of electrons and other charged particles close in to the black hole. Not only did astronomers measure the black hole brightening extremely over this time, they also observed what they called “light echoes”-time lags between the x-ray light coming from two different areas around the black hole. Another observatory on the station, the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), monitored the flare with near-daily observations over the next few months. The object, called MAXI J1820+070, was first spotted by the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) experiment on the International Space Station. The outburst began on March 11, 2018, and quickly transformed a black hole that had been totally invisible to telescopes into one of the brightest objects (in terms of x-ray light) in the entire sky. ![]() “We know this is happening but we don’t understand how it works in detail.” Kara presented the discovery Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Seattle. “One of our big questions is how do we go from this process of material flowing into the black hole to this process of flowing out?” says astronomer Erin Kara of the University of Maryland, College Park, lead author of a paper on the findings, published this week in Nature. Measurements of this tantrum have given scientists one of the clearest pictures yet of what happens when black holes erupt with energy. And sometimes they seem to go downright crazy.Īstronomers recently spotted one black hole, nearly 10,000 light-years from Earth, belching out an enormous explosion of x-ray light. ![]() We tend to think black holes gobble up all the matter around them-but they can actually spew out as much as they suck in.
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