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NASA’s IXPE Details Shapes of Structures at Newly Discovered Black Hole
- NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has helped astronomers better understand the shapes of structures essential to a black hole – specifically, the disk of material swirling around it, and the shifting plasma region called the corona.
- The stellar-mass black hole, part of the binary system Swift J1727.8-1613, was discovered in the summer of 2023 during an unusual brightening event that briefly caused it to outshine nearly all other X-ray sources.
- IXPE, which has helped NASA and researchers study all these phenomena, specializes in X-ray polarization, the characteristic of light that helps map the shape and structure of such ultra-powerful energy sources, illuminating their inner workings even when they’re too distant for us to see directly.
- The team further monitored how polarization values changed during Swift J1727’s peak outburst. Those conclusions matched findings simultaneously obtained during studies of other energy bands of electromagnetic radiation.
- The results represent a significant step forward in our understanding of the changing shapes and structures of accretion disk, corona, and related structures at black holes in general.
- IXPE is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- The study demonstrates IXPE’s value as a tool for determining how different elements of the system are connected, as well as its potential to collaborate with other observatories to monitor sudden, dramatic changes in the cosmos.
- Swift J1727 briefly remained brighter than the Crab Nebula, the standard X-ray “candle” used to provide a baseline for units of X-ray brightness. Such outbursts are not unusual among binary star systems, but rarely do they occur so brightly and so close to home – just 8,800 light years from Earth.
- X-ray binary systems typically include two close-proximity stars at different stages of their lifecycle. When the elder star runs out of fuel, it explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star, white dwarf, or black hole.
- Michal Dovčiak, co-author of the series of papers and leader of the IXPE working group on stellar-mass black holes, said, “Further observations of matter near black holes in binary systems are needed, but the successful first observing campaign of Swift J1727.8–1613 in different states is the best start of a new chapter we could imagine.”
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