RAS/Southampton: Violent Flaring at Heart of a Black Hole System

[bystander]

Violent Flaring Revealed at the Heart of a Black Hole System
Royal Astronomical Society | University of Southampton | 2019 Oct 11

An artist's impression of the black hole system MAXI J1820+070, based upon observed characteristics. The black hole is seen to feed off the companion star, drawing the material out into a vast disc of inspiralling matter. As it falls closer to the black hole itself, some of that material is shot out into energetic pencil-beam 'jets' above and below the disc. The light here is intense enough to outshine the Sun a thousand times over. (Credit John Paice)

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An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Southampton, have used state-of-the-art cameras to create a high frame-rate movie of a growing black hole system at a level of detail never seen before. In the process they uncovered new clues to understanding the immediate surroundings of these enigmatic objects. ...

Black holes can feed off a nearby star and create vast accretion discs of material. Here, the effect of the black hole’s strong gravity and the material’s own magnetic field can cause rapidly changing levels of radiation to be emitted from the system as a whole.

This radiation was detected in visible light by the HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (La Palma, Canary Islands) and in X-rays by NASA's NICER observatory aboard the International Space Station.

The black hole system studied is named MAXI J1820+070, and was first discovered in early 2018. It is only about 10,000 light years away, in our own Milky Way. It has the mass of about 7 Suns, collapsed down to a region of space smaller than the City of London. ...

A Black Hole X-ray Binary at ~100 Hz: Multiwavelength Timing of
MAXI J1820+070 with HiPERCAM and NICER ~ J. A. Paice et al

• Monthly Notices of the RAS: Letters (online 03 Oct 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slz148
• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1910.04174 > 09 Oct 2019