Astronomers at mit for the first time recorded the disappearance of bright x-ray corona of energetic particles around the black hole, remote from Earth at 100 million light years. The cause of the phenomenon could be a massive catastrophe that destroyed an entire star. About it reported in a press release published on the website Phys.org.
The researchers performed a search for bright cosmic flashes with automatic tool ASSASN designed to identify supernovae. They found the outbreak of an unknown nature in the active galactic nucleus 1ES 1927+654, consisting of a supermassive black hole. The brightness of the object was above the usual 40 times.
Experts believe that a strange phenomenon occurred due to the stars caught in the gravity field of a black hole. Shining could get in the accretion disk and be torn apart, causing all the material of the disc, including high-energy particles collapsed into the event horizon and disappeared from the visible Universe. As a result of only one year the black hole was the dimmer 10 thousand times. Usually, such changes of the brightness take from thousands to millions of years, scientists say. In this case, a noticeable drop in brightness took at least ten hours.
After the disappearance of the crown the black hole started re-accumulating material with the outer edges of the disk, creating a new high-energy x-rays that are emitted from near the event horizon. Thus, in just a few months, the crown resumed, returning to the original brightness.
While scientists do not know exactly the mechanism of the crown, but I think that it has something to do with the configuration of magnetic field lines passing through the accretion disk. Near the event horizon the magnetic field lines can twist and tear that contributes to their reconnection. This, in turn, spins the particles close to a black hole, causing them to emit x-ray radiation, forming a crown.
