A joint NASA/Italian space mission has put its sunglasses on to observe polarized X-ray light from a corona of hot gas around the Cygnus X-1 black hole.
They find that the X-rays are being scattered off material in a coronal region 2,000 kilometers wide around the black hole. A black hole's corona is formed of ultra-hot plasma and is suspected to be involved in the production of jets of charged particles that are seen by radio telescopes racing away from black holes like Cygnus X-1.
Furthermore, the corona and inner accretion disk seem to be misaligned relative to the orbital plane of the the companion star around the black hole and the orientation of the outer accretion disk. This misalignment could have been caused as a result of thethat produced the black hole causing the black hole to spin at an angle to the system. This acute spin, and the gravity the black hole wields, could then have introduced torques in the inner disk, twisting and warping it.
"These new insights will enable improved X-ray studies of how gravity curves space and time close to black holes," said Krawczynski.
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