For the first time, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched as a supermassive black hole’s own corona, the ultrabright, billion-degree ring of high-energy particles that encircles a black hole’s event horizon, was abruptly destroyed. The cause of this dramatic transformation is unclear, though the researchers guess that the source of the calamity may have been a star caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull. Like a pebble tossed into a gearbox, the star may have ricocheted through the black hole’s disk of swirling material, causing everything in the vicinity, including the corona’s high-energy particles, to suddenly plummet into the black hole.
In March 2018, an unexpected burst lit up the view of ASSASN, the All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae, that surveys the entire night sky for supernova activity. The survey recorded a flash from 1ES 1927+654, an active galactic nucleus, or AGN, that is a type of supermassive black hole with higher-than-normal brightness at the center of a galaxy. ASSASN observed that the object’s brightness jumped to about 40 times its normal luminosity. The team used multiple telescopes to observe the black hole in the X-ray, optical, and ultraviolet wave bands.
With frequent observations, the researchers were able to catch the black hole as it precipitously dropped in brightness, in virtually all the wave bands they measured, and especially in the high-energy X-ray band — an observation that signaled that the black hole’s corona had completely and suddenly vaporized.
Physicists are unsure exactly what causes a corona to form, but they believe it has something to do with the configuration of magnetic field lines that run through a black hole’s accretion disk. At the outer regions of a black hole’s swirling disk of material, magnetic field lines are more or less in a straightforward configuration. Closer in, and especially near the event horizon, material circles with more energy, in a way that may cause magnetic field lines to twist and break, then reconnect. This tangle of magnetic energy could spin up particles swirling close to the black hole, to the level of high-energy X-rays, forming the crown-like corona that encircles the black hole.
if a wayward star was indeed the culprit in the corona’s disappearance, it would have first been shredded apart by the black hole’s gravitational pull, scattering stellar debris across the accretion disk. This may have caused the temporary flash in brightness that ASSASN captured. This “tidal disruption,” as astronomers call such a jolting event, would have triggered much of the material in the disk to suddenly fall into the black hole. It also might have thrown the disk’s magnetic field lines out of whack in a way that it could no longer generate and support a high-energy corona.
This last point is a potentially important one for understanding how coronas first form. Depending on the mass of a black hole, there is a certain radius within which a star will most certainly be pulled in by a black hole’s gravity.
The researchers calculated that if a star indeed was the cause of the black hole’s missing corona, and if a corona were to form in a supermassive black hole of similar size, it would do so within a radius of about 4 light minutes — a distance that roughly translates to about 75 million kilometers from the black hole’s center.
The corona has since reformed, lighting up in high-energy X-rays which the team was also able to observe. It’s not as bright as it once was, but the researchers are continuing to monitor it, though less frequently, to see what more this system has in store.
— source Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Jul 16, 2020