NASA’s black-hole hunting telescope has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole.
A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days. “The corona recently collapsed in towards the black hole, with the result that the black hole’s intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiralling inward,” said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, lead author of the research paper.
As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it. The result captured by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light.