Observe the black hole with the naked eye

The only device to observe an active black hole near the Earth is a 20cm diameter telescope.

According to a study published January 6 in the journal Nature, astronomers in Japan discovered that black hole activity can be observed through flashing light that appears from the gas surrounding the black hole while Eruptions. The results show that not only X-rays but also all optical light sources are reliable sources of data to observe black hole activities.

"Now we know that it is possible to observe black holes based on visible light without the need for X-ray telescopes or Gamma rays , " said the lead author of the study, Mariko Kimura at Kyoto University. with Science Daily.

Black holes can be observed through visible light whenever they radiate.(Photo: Eiri Ono / Kyoto University).

Black hole eruptions occur only once in a few decades, when massive energy including X-rays emanating from matter falls into the black hole. Black holes are often surrounded by a growing disk of gaseous material . In it, gaseous matter from a nearby star will gradually be sucked into the spiral by a black hole. Black hole activities are often observed through X-rays, created from inside the gas disk that is accumulating, where the temperature can reach 10 million degrees Kelvin or greater.

V404 Cygni , one of the binary black holes thought to be closest to Earth, "woke up" after 26 years of silence with an outbreak on June 15, 2015. t

Scientists from Kyoto University, Japan, obtained a large amount of data from the V404 Cygni, detecting repeated data from a few minutes to a few hours. Among them, data recorded by visible light has similarities with data recorded from traditional X-rays.

Based on analysis of observation data with visible and X-ray light, the research team and collaborators at the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), RIKEN National Laboratory, and Hiroshima University, discovered. The visible light they observed was derived from X-rays appearing in the innermost areas of the gas disk around the black hole. These X-rays radiate and heat the outer area of ​​the gas disk, making it emit light visible to the naked eye.