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.
#science #blackhole #space
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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
Black hole footage courtesy of NASA and European Southern Observatory.
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