NASA/JPL/RAS: NuSTAR Sees Rare Blurring of Black Hole Light

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:58 pm

NuSTAR Sees Rare Blurring of Black Hole Light
NASA | JPL-Caltech | RAS | NuSTAR | 2014 Aug 12

[url=http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16695][b][i]Black Holes: Monsters in Space[/i][/b][/url] - [b][i](Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)[/i][/b] The regions around supermassive black holes shine brightly in X-rays. Some of this radiation comes from a surrounding disk, and most comes from the corona, pictured here in this artist's concept as the white light at the base of a jet.
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole. A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.

"The corona recently collapsed in toward the black hole, with the result that the black hole's intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiraling inward," said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, United Kingdom, lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it. The result was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light. Such events had been observed previously, but never to this degree and in such detail. ...

Black hole spin and size of the X-ray emitting region(s) in the Seyfert 1.5 galaxy ESO 362-G18 - Beatriz Agís-González et al

Monthly Notices of the RAS 443(4) 2862 (2014 Oct 01) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1358
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1407.1238 > 04 Jul 2014