The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a NASA-Italian Space Agency collaboration, recently delved deep into heated plasma around a black hole, producing data that are helping scientists understand how black holes simultaneously devour and spew back matter.
IXPE is deployed in December 2021 to examine a number of the known universe's most energetic objects, including that accumulating black holes, neutron stars, and pulsars. This is accomplished by examining the orientation of the X-rays released by all these extreme objects. Sunglasses function on the concept of polarization, which means that they filter all illumination except that which fluctuates in a certain direction. Conversely, the polarized X-rays detected by IPXE are electromagnetic waves that vibrate predominantly in one direction, as reported by Geeky News.
Following a statement from Eurekalert, as per the main researcher Henric Krawcynski of Washington University in Saint Louis, the polarization includes information regarding how the X-rays were released. In the case of black holes, polarization tells us if and where the X-rays reflect off matter adjacent to the black hole, Krawcynski remarked.
IXPE Discovering System Constellations
IXPE detected Cygnus X-1, an X-ray binary system in the constellation Cygnus the Swan that consists of a 21-solar-mass black hole as well as a 41-solar-mass companion star. The gravity of the black hole is pulling stuff away from its star partner, and this material is generating a flow of gas that spirals from around the black hole, forming an 'accretion disk.'
Following the early report from Space.com, the friction from the inside of the gas increases the temperature to millions of degrees Fahrenheit, which is high enough to release X-rays. Despite frictional, magnetic, strong gravitational forces all at work inside the disk, astronomers have never been exactly sure how part of that material falls past the event horizon and enters the black hole's jaws, as well as how some of it is diverted into bipolar discharges that exit the black hole.
IXPE data, together with secondary X-ray observations from NASA's NuSTAR mission and also the NICER instrument on top of the International Space Station, gave information on the shape and position of the material releasing the X-rays near Cygnus X-1's black hole.
This illustration shows the Cygnus X-1 system, located more than 6,000 light-years from Earth. The black hole is shown at the center and its companion star is depicted on the left. The immense gravity of the black hole pulls material off the star, forming a disk called an “accretion disk” around the black hole.
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The Coronal and Internal Accretion Disk
The astronomers also discover that X-rays are being dispersed by debris in a 2,000-kilometer-wide annular area surrounding the black hole. The corona of a black hole is made of ultra-hot plasma and yet is believed to be involved in the formation of charged particle jets detected by scientific instruments racing out through black holes such as Cygnus X-1.
The polarization of the X-rays observed by IPXE indicates that the corona of Cygnus X-1 spreads away from the black hole parallel to the direction of the accretion disc and perpendicular to the jets. As a result, the corona either sandwiched the in-spiraling matter or formed the inner half of the accretion disk, as stated in the press release from NASA.
Additionally, the coronal and internal accretion disks appear to be mismatched concerning the partner star's elliptical orbit and the direction of the outermost accretion disk. This misalignment might have been generated by the supernova that created the black hole, leading the black hole to rotate at an inclination to the system. This fast spin, along with the black hole's gravity, might have caused forces and moments in the interior disk, bending and warping it.
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