By Washington University in St. Louis
December 31, 2022
An artists impression of the Cygnus X-1 system, with the black hole appearing in the center and its buddy star on the. New measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported on November 3 in the journal Science, represent the very first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, a worldwide cooperation in between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled towards a black hole. Researchers are utilizing measurements of the polarization of these X-rays to test and improve models that describe how black holes swallow matter, ending up being some of the most luminous sources of light– consisting of X-rays– in the universe.
“Beyond Cygnus X-1, IXPE is being used to study a broad range of extreme X-ray sources, including mass accreting neutron stars, pulsars and pulsar wind nebulae, supernova residues, our galactic center and active stellar nuclei.
” Previous X-ray observations of great voids just measured the arrival instructions, arrival time, and energy of the X-rays from hot plasma spiraling toward the black holes,” said lead author Henric Krawczynski, the Wayman Crow Professor of Physics in Arts & & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a professors fellow in the universitys McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. “IXPE also measures their direct polarization, which brings info about how the X-rays were given off– and if, and where, they spread off product close to the great void.”
No light, not even light from X-rays, can leave from inside the event horizon of a black hole. The X-rays found with IXPE are given off by the hot matter, or plasma, in a 2,000-km diameter area surrounding the 60-km size event horizon of the black hole.
Combining the IXPE data with concurrent observations from NASAs NICER and NuSTAR X-ray observatories in May and June 2022 permitted the authors to constrain the geometry– i.e., shape and area– of the plasma.
The researchers found that the plasma extends perpendicular to a two-sided, pencil-shaped plasma outflow, or jet, imaged in earlier radio observations. The positioning of the instructions of the X-ray polarization and the jet lends strong support to the hypothesis that the processes in the X-ray brilliant area near to the great void play an important function in launching the jet.
The observations match designs anticipating that the corona of hot plasma either sandwiches the disk of matter spiraling towards the black hole or changes the inner part of that disk. The brand-new polarization data eliminate models in which the black holes corona is a narrow plasma column or cone along the jet axis.
The scientists kept in mind that a better understanding of the geometry of the plasma around a black hole can reveal much about the inner functions of black holes and how they accrete mass.
” These new insights will allow enhanced X-ray studies of how gravity curves area and time near to great voids,” Krawczynski stated.
Associated with the Cygnus X-1 black hole specifically, “IXPE observations expose that the accretion flow is seen more edge-on than previously believed,” discussed co-author Michal Dovciak at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
” This might be a signature of a misalignment of the equatorial airplane of the black hole and the orbital airplane of the binary,” or the paired duo of the black hole and its companion star, clarified co-author Alexandra Veledina from the University of Turku. “The system might have gotten that misalignment when the black hole progenitor star blew up.”
” The IXPE objective utilizes X-ray mirrors produced at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center and focal plane instrumentation provided by a cooperation of ASI, the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics,” said co-author Fabio Muleri of INAF-IAPS. “Beyond Cygnus X-1, IXPE is being utilized to study a vast array of extreme X-ray sources, including mass accreting neutron stars, pulsars and pulsar wind nebulae, supernova residues, our galactic center and active stellar nuclei. Weve found a great deal of surprises, and were having a lot of enjoyable.”
A 2nd paper in the same problem of Science was led by Roberto Taverna at the University of Padova and describes the IXPE detection of extremely polarized X-rays from the magnetar 4U 0142 +61.
” We are thrilled to belong to this new wave of scientific discovery in astrophysics,” Krawczynski stated.
Reference: “Polarized x-rays constrain the disk-jet geometry in the black hole x-ray binary Cygnus X-1” by Henric Krawczynski, Fabio Muleri, Michal Dovciak, Alexandra Veledina, Nicole Rodriguez Cavero, Jiri Svoboda, Adam Ingram, Giorgio Matt, Javier A. Garcia, Vladislav Loktev, Michela Negro, Juri Poutanen, Takao Kitaguchi, Jakub Podgorný, John Rankin, Wenda Zhang, Andrei Berdyugin, Svetlana V. Berdyugina, Stefano Bianchi, Dmitry Blinov, Fiamma Capitanio, Niccolò Di Lalla, Paul Draghis, Sergio Fabiani, Masato Kagitani, Vadim Kravtsov, Sebastian Kiehlmann, Luca Latronico, Alexander A. Lutovinov, Nikos Mandarakas, Frédéric Marin, Andrea Marinucci, Jon M. Miller, Tsunefumi Mizuno, Sergey V. Molkov, Nicola Omodei, Pierre-Olivier Petrucci, Ajay Ratheesh, Takeshi Sakanoi, Andrei N. Semena, Raphael Skalidis, Paolo Soffitta, Allyn F. Tennant, Phillipp Thalhammer, Francesco Tombesi, Martin C. Weisskopf, Joern Wilms, Sixuan Zhang, Iván Agudo, Lucio A. Antonelli, Matteo Bachetti, Luca Baldini, Wayne H. Baumgartner, Ronaldo Bellazzini, Stephen D. Bongiorno, Raffaella Bonino, Alessandro Brez, Niccolò Bucciantini, Simone Castellano, Elisabetta Cavazzuti, Stefano Ciprini, Enrico Costa, Alessandra De Rosa, Ettore Del Monte, Laura Di Gesu, Alessandro Di Marco, Immacolata Donnarumma, Victor Doroshenko, Steven R. Ehlert, Teruaki Enoto, Yuri Evangelista, Riccardo Ferrazzoli, Shuichi Gunji, Kiyoshi Hayashida, Jeremy Heyl, Wataru Iwakiri, Svetlana G. Jorstad, Vladimir Karas, Jeffery J. Kolodziejczak, Fabio La Monaca, Ioannis Liodakis, Simone Maldera, Alberto Manfreda, Alan P. Marscher, Herman L. Marshall, Ikuyuki Mitsuishi, Chi-Yung Ng, Stephen L. ODell, Chiara Oppedisano, Alessandro Papitto, George G. Pavlov, Abel L. Peirson, Matteo Perri, Melissa Pesce-Rollins, Maura Pilia, Andrea Possenti, Simonetta Puccetti, Brian D. Ramsey, Roger W. Romani, Carmelo Sgrò, Patrick Slane, Gloria Spandre, Toru Tamagawa, Fabrizio Tavecchio, Roberto Taverna, Yuzuru Tawara, Nicholas E. Thomas, Alessio Trois, Sergey Tsygankov, Roberto Turolla, Jacco Vink, Kinwah Wu, Fei Xie, Silvia Zane, 3 November 2022, Science.DOI: 10.1126/ science.add5399.
An artists impression of the Cygnus X-1 system, with the black hole appearing in the center and its companion star left wing. New measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported on November 3 in the journal Science, represent the first observations of a mass-accreting great void from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) objective, a global cooperation between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. Credit: John Paice
Scientists current observations of a stellar-mass black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal brand-new information about the setup of very hot matter in the area immediately surrounding the black hole.
Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled towards a black hole. This hot matter glows in X-rays. Scientists are using measurements of the polarization of these X-rays to evaluate and fine-tune designs that describe how great voids swallow matter, ending up being a few of the most luminous sources of light– consisting of X-rays– in the universe.
The brand-new measurements from Cygnus X-1, released recently by the journal Science, represent the very first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) objective, a worldwide partnership in between NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Cygnus X-1 is one of the brightest X-ray sources in our galaxy, including a 21 solar mass great void in orbit with a 41 solar mass companion star.