A team of MIT scientists are looking for black hole echoes in an effort to shed some light on the regions of spacetime that are a mystery to us. Black holes only show activity when they feed on gas and dust from one of their stars. They give off X-ray light that echoes off the gas being consumed and illuminates their surroundings when they do. That is a black hole echo. While it is technically an X-ray echo, the team worked with MIT education and music scholars to turn the emission into sound waves you can listen to below.
Astronomers used an automated search tool called Reverberation Machine to comb through data gathered by NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, the X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Black hole X-ray binary systems are systems with a star that is being eaten by a black hole. Ten of them are close enough for the echoes to be observable, and eight were previously not known to emit echoes.
What did the team discover by analyzing the echoes? They found that the black holes go through a hard state after feeding, where they form a corona of high-energy photons and a jet of high-energy particles close to the speed of light. The state lasts for a while. When the corona and jet die out, the black hole enters a soft state.
The scientists believe that these findings can help explain how black holes at the center of the universe help shape the formation of the universe. The assistant professor of physics at MIT said that.
"The role of black holes in galaxy evolution is an outstanding question in modern astrophysics. Interestingly, these black hole binaries appear to be ‘mini’ supermassive black holes, and so by understanding the outbursts in these small, nearby systems, we can understand how similar outbursts in supermassive black holes affect the galaxies in which they reside."
All Rights Reserved © 2024
