A black hole corona is a changing X-ray flash that emits a glow that can be seen hundreds of light years away.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Seeing any cosmic object being devoured by a black hole is both exciting and downright scary. See the same black hole recreate what it had just destroyed? Add mysterious and confusing to the mix.
Two years ago, astronomers watched as a black hole located in a galaxy known as 1ES 1927 + 654 slowly devoured an ultra-hot gas disk, known as a black hole corona, before gradually rebuilding another one. Over the course of weeks, this facilitated a dimming of the brightness of the black hole by a factor of 10,000, followed by a subsequent brightness of more than 20 times its original brightness.
Scientists were puzzled about what might have caused such an event.
A new study, published in the Astrophysics Journal Letters on Thursday, proposes a new hypothesis: It may have been the work of a runaway star. According to the report, a possible explanation sees a rogue star bouncing through the black hole, causing a gravitational avalanche effect that sank all neighboring matter into the black hole next to it, including the corona.
This is not the same type of crown We are dealing on earth right now, but hey, if a black hole wants to take it out of their hands, it would be great (avoiding all blame if this fools us and sees 2020 hitting us with something cosmic catastrophic).
A black hole corona is a glossy feature made up of X-rays, which creates a flare that shoots outward, allowing us to see its glow from millions of light-years away. And it was the fluctuation of this glare that allowed scientists to come up with an explanation.
“Normally we don’t see variations like this in the accumulation of black holes,” said Claudio Ricci, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, in a NASA statement.
“It was so strange that at first we thought maybe there was something wrong with the data. When we saw it was real, it was very exciting. But we also had no idea what we were dealing with; no one we spoke to had seen anything like this.”
Given the dramatic variation in luminosity over time, it is still entirely possible that the cause of the phenomenon is something completely different, so further monitoring is required to bring more responses to the table.
“This data set has a lot of puzzles,” said Erin Kara, co-author of the new study and an assistant professor of physics at MIT. “We think the star hypothesis is good, but I also think we are going to analyze this event for a long time.”
