How do supermassive black holes shape the evolution of galaxies? What does an event horizon really look like? Why do black holes emit bursts of energy called ‘relativistic jets’?
In search of answers to these questions, astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons. To reconstruct the immediate environment, Kara turns to the X-ray light given off by the accretion disk, measuring the timing of photons using a telescope mounted on the International Space Station. This technique — called reverberation mapping — works in a manner similar to how bats ‘see’ using sound echolocation, allowing researchers to infer the structure of the gas and plasma with remarkable resolution.
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Read the full article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-see-black-holes-in-detail-she-uses-echoes-like-a-bat-20240212
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Chapters:
00:00 How do supermassive black holes shape our galaxy?
00:59 Blackholes release X-rays as matter falls in
02:00 Using the NICER telescope to capture photons from black holes
02:30 Reverberation mapping technique is like echolocation
04:10 Imaging stellar-mass black holes
04:34 Formation of relativistic jets
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