Supermassive Black Hole's Light Blurs in Rare Event

Astronomers have captured an extremely rare event with the help of the NASA Nuclear Stectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), the orbiting X-ray telescope. They've spotted a compact source of X-rays, called a corona, sitting near a supermassive black hole has moved closer to the black hole over just a matter of days.

What's so unusual about this particular event? 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. This caused an extreme blurring and stretching of X-ray light.

"The corona recently collapsed in toward 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 spiraling inward," said Michael Parker, lead author of the new study, in a news release.

This particular phenomenon has never before been seen to such a degree and in such detail. Currently, the corona is still in close configuration with the black hole, which is called Markarian 335 and is located about 324 million light-years from Earth. Scientists aren't sure when the corona will shift back and, even more interestingly, it seems as if the grip of the black hole's gravity pulled the corona's light onto the inner portion of its superheated disk, which better illuminated it.

"We still don't understand exactly how the corona is produced or why it changes its shape, but we see it lighting up material around the black hole, enabling us to study the regions to close in that effects described by Einstein's theory of general relativity become prominent," said Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR Principal Investigator. "NuSTAR's unprecedented capability for observing this and similar events allows us to study the most extreme light-bending effects of general relativity."

The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.