by As a stellar-mass black hole pulls in gas and dust from an orbiting star, it can give off spectacular bursts of X-rays that bounce and echo off the inspiraling gas, briefly illuminating a black hole’s extreme surroundings.
In new research, astrophysicists from the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and elsewhere have used an automated search tool — which they’ve coined the ‘Reverberation Machine’ — to comb through the data from NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a high-time-resolution X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station, for signs of black hole echoes.
As a result, they’ve discovered eight new echoing black hole binaries in our Milky Way Galaxy. Previously, only two such systems in the Milky Way were known to emit X-ray echoes.
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In new research, astrophysicists from the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and elsewhere have used an automated search tool — which they’ve coined the ‘Reverberation Machine’ — to comb through the data from NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a high-time-resolution X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station, for signs of black hole echoes.
As a result, they’ve discovered eight new echoing black hole binaries in our Milky Way Galaxy. Previously, only two such systems in the Milky Way were known to emit X-ray echoes.
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