NASA | MSFC | Chandra X-ray Observatory | 2019 Jul 03
Like whirlpools in the ocean, spinning black holes in space create a swirling torrent around them. However, black holes do not create eddies of wind or water. Rather, they generate disks of gas and dust heated to hundreds of millions of degrees that glow in X-ray light.
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and chance alignments across billions of light years, astronomers have deployed a new technique to measure the spin of five supermassive black holes. The matter in one of these cosmic vortices is swirling around its black hole at greater than about 70% of the speed of light.
The astronomers took advantage of a natural phenomenon called a gravitational lens. With just the right alignment, the bending of space-time by a massive object, such as a large galaxy, can magnify and produce multiple images of a distant object, as predicted by Einstein.
In this latest research, astronomers used Chandra and gravitational lensing to study six quasars, each consisting of a supermassive black hole rapidly consuming matter from a surrounding accretion disk. Gravitational lensing of the light from each of these quasars by an intervening galaxy has created multiple images of each quasar, as shown by these Chandra images of four of the targets. The sharp imaging ability of Chandra is needed to separate the multiple, lensed images of each quasar.
The key advance made by researchers in this study was that they took advantage of “microlensing,” where individual stars in the intervening, lensing galaxy provided additional magnification of the light from the quasar. A higher magnification means a smaller region is producing the X-ray emission. ...
Constraining Quasar Relativistic Reflection Regions and Spins with Microlensing ~ Xinyu Dai et al
- Astrophysical Journal 879(1):35 (2019 Jul 01) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab1d56
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1901.06007 > 17 Jan 2019 (v1), 01 May 2019 (v2)