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X-ray flashes from nearby supermassive black hole accelerate mysteriously
MIT astronomers observed flashes of X-rays coming from a supermassive black hole at a steadily increasing clip. The source could be the core of a dead star that’s teetering at the black hole’s edge.
“ These new detectors are designed to detect oscillations on the scale of minutes, so this black hole system is in that sweet spot,” says co-author Erin Kara, associate professor of physics at MIT. The study’s other co-authors include MIT Kavli members Christos Panagiotou, Joheen Chakraborty, Kevin Burdge, Riccardo Arcodia, Ronald Remillard, and Jingyi Wang, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions. The team plans to continue observing the system, with existing and future telescopes, to better understand the extreme physics at work in a black hole’s innermost environments.
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