NASA Solves Mystery of Black Hole's High Powered X-Rays (Video)

Black holes emit high powered X-rays as gas spirals toward them. Yet astrophysicists have been unable to explain why they produce so much energy. Now, they may have discovered new clues when it comes to solving this mystery.

When gas spirals toward a black hole, it forms an accretion disk. This mass of material heats up to roughly 10 million degrees Celsius, making the main body of the disk about 2,000 times hotter than the sun. Usually emitting low-energy or "soft" X-rays, this disk can also emit "hard" X-rays which produce up to 100 times higher energy levels.

"Black holes are truly exotic, with extraordinarily high temperatures, incredibly rapid motions and gravity exhibiting the full weirdness of general relativity," said Julian Krolik, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But our calculations show we can understand a lot about them using only standard physics principles."

In order to understand a little bit more about black holes and these X-rays, scientists used a combination of supercomputer simulations and traditional hand-written calculations. More specifically, the computer simulation involved equations that governed the complex motion of inflowing gas and its associated magnetic fields near an accreting black hole. The rising temperature, density and speed of the inflowing gas dramatically amplify magnetic fields threading through the disk, which then exert additional influence on the gas.

After examining the computer model and solving several calculations, the researchers showed for the first time that high-energy light emission is not only possible, but is an inevitable outcome of gas being drawn into a black hole. Photons are created in a hot, tenuous region in the disk called the corona. This corona, boiling violently above the comparatively cool disk, is similar to the corona surrounding the sun, which is responsible for much of the ultra-violet and X-ray luminosity seen in the solar spectrum.

"Our work traces the complex motions, particle interactions and turbulent magnetic fields in billion-degree gas on the threshold of a black hole, one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe," said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a news release.

The research reveals a little bit more about these black holes, showing scientists exactly how X-rays are emitted, absorbed and scattered throughout the accretion disk and the corona region.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Want to see the computer simulation of the black hole accretion disk for yourself? Check out the video below, originally appearing here.