Scientists have discovered eight pairs of mirror-image black hole pairs in the Milky Way utilizing a new instrument they’ve dubbed the “Reverberation Machine.”
NASA’s Reverberation Machine used satellite measurements from the ISS NICER instrument, which examines X-ray radiation from objects involving black holes & neutron stars, producing what’s known as an “echo.”
A black hole is a huge object with a gravitational influence so strong that light is unable to escape it. Accretion rings, which contain super-heated clouds of gas, are common around black holes. X-rays are created when a little amount of this very hot stuff descends into a black hole.
To put it another way, the black hole is like an insatiable parasite that feasts on its larger partner star, causing its close surroundings to shine with X-rays. Scientists can now see black holes that were previously inaccessible because of the accretion disks they’ve discovered.
There have been 5 – 15 times the size of the Sun’s black holes, and they all ate stars that had the same mass. There was an initial eruption of black holes that went on for many weeks while during this period the black holes formed bright coronas and emitted enormous discharges of matter that were virtually traveling at the speed of light, according to the team’s findings. When the black holes dropped in energy, the coronas dimmed and the blasts died out across some few days.
There are ‘echoes’ of the original emission created when part of those X-rays bounce off the accumulation rings. A year ago, astronomers found for the first instance that radiation echoes at the far end of a black hole, but this black hole is now in a different galaxy than the eight recently confirmed echoes.
