New findings using data from NASA’s IXPE mission offer unprecedented insight into the shape and nature of a structure important to black holes called a corona.
A corona is a shifting plasma region that is part of the flow of matter onto a black hole, about which scientists have only a theoretical understanding. The new results reveal the corona’s shape for the first time, and may aid scientists’ understanding of the corona’s role in feeding and sustaining black holes.
Less well known, perhaps, is that snacking black holes, much like Earth’s Sun and other stars, also possess a superheated. While the Sun’s corona, which is the star’s outermost atmosphere, burns at roughly 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a black hole corona is estimated atamong stellar-mass black holes – those formed by a star’s collapse – and supermassive black holes such as the one at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
“X-ray polarization provides a new way to examine black hole accretion geometry,” Saade said. “If the accretion geometry of black holes is similar regardless of mass, we expect the same to be true of their polarization properties.” That’s surprising, said Marshall astrophysicist Philip Kaaret, principal investigator for the IXPE mission, because the way the two types are fed is completely different.
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