MAXI J1820+070: Violent Flaring Revealed At The Heart Of A Black Hole System

The black hole system studied is named MAXI J1820+070, and was first discovered in early 2018. It is only about 10,000 lightyears away, in our own Milky Way. It has a mass of about 7 Suns, with this collapsed down to a region of space smaller than the City of London.

Investigating these systems is usually very difficult, as their distances make them too faint and too small to see – not even using the Event Horizon Telescope, which recently took a picture of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. The HiPERCAM and NICER instruments, however, let the researchers record ‘movies’ of the changing light from the system at over three hundred frames per second, capturing violent ‘crackling’ and ‘flaring’ of visible and X-ray light.

“The movie was made using real data, but slowed down to 1/10th of actual speed to allow the most rapid flares to be discerned by the human eye,” John Paice, a graduate student at the University of Southampton and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics in India, said in a press release.

“We can see how the material around the black hole is so bright, it’s outshining the star that it is consuming, and the fastest flickers last only a few milliseconds – that’s the output of a hundred Suns and more being emitted in the blink of an eye.”

Researchers also found that dips in X-ray levels are accompanied by a rise in visible light (and vice-versa). And the fastest flashes in visible light were found to emerge a fraction of a second after X-rays. Such patterns indirectly reveal the presence of distinct plasma, extremely hot material where electrons are stripped away from atoms, in structures deep in the embrace of the black hole’s gravity, otherwise too small to resolve.

Paper