NASA’s Swift and NuSTAR: Black Hole Has Major Flare

The diagram shows a black hole surrounded by a corona, which gathers inwards then shoots away from the black hole.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

CITA National Fellow Dan Wilkins of St. Mary’s University was recently the lead author of a paper that more deeply characterizes the behaviour of supermassive black holes. The results from the observations by NASA’s Explorer missions Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) could “help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe,” said Wilkins during a press release issued by NASA in October 2015.

To read the full press release, click here.

To watch a video explanation of the observation, click here.

This study was published in the journal MNRAS, click here for the abstract.