The black hole itself cannot be seen because it acts as a one-way trapdoor even for light. In the latest study, the team analysed more than 13,000 observations of the black hole from 133 nights since 2003, gathered by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.” “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. “I’d already seen them in the theory I’ve been developing, so once I saw them in the telescope observations, I could figure out the connection.“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior author of the research. “I’ve been building theoretical predictions of how these echoes appear to us for a few years,” said Wilkins. These, the researchers determined, are the same X-ray flares but reflected from the back of the disk – a first glimpse at the far side of 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.Īs Wilkins took a closer look to investigate the origin of the flares, he saw a series of smaller flashes. 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. “Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action,” said Roger Blandford, a co-author of the paper who is the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford professor of physics and SLAC professor of particle physics and astrophysics. The strange discovery, detailed in a paper published July 28 in Nature, is the first direct observation of light from behind a black hole – a scenario that was predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity but never confirmed, until now. “The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself,” Wilkins explained. It is another strange characteristic of the black hole, however, that makes this observation possible. “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 Wilkins, who is a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. (Image credit: Dan Wilkins)Īccording to theory, these luminous echoes 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. The flares echoed off of the gas falling into the black hole, and as the flares were subsiding, short flashes of X-rays were seen – corresponding to the reflection of the flares from the far side of the disk, bent around the black hole by its strong gravitational field. Researchers observed bright flares of X-ray emissions, produced as gas falls into a supermassive black hole.
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