Here is a picture of an amazing X-ray explosion coming from a black hole

This image of amazing beauty has just appeared on the official NASA website: we can admire the effect of the “light echoes” of the black hole, namely these Concentric rings emit X-rays Coming from a cosmic monster about 7800 light years from Earth.

The photo was taken with a file Chandra X-ray Observatory NASA (She is famous for her unique and strange pictures), combining the data with his surveys fast gamma ray burst explorer (SWIFT). The origin of these strange concentric rings is a black hole located in the binary system V404 Cygni, which is part of the so-called microquasar.

The black hole attracts material from the companion star – about half the mass of the Sun – creating an accretion disk around the invisible object. This swirling material, propelled at insane speeds, It glows in different emissions of the electromagnetic spectrum but especially in X-rays.

On June 5, 2015, SWIFT detected a unique and powerful X-ray emission (a real explosion) coming from V404 will sing, to generate what we see in the image as high-energy loops, creating an effect known as “light echo“It could have been observed because X-rays from the black hole – traveling to Earth – collide with interstellar material, such as cosmic dust, leaving ‘signals’.” In this illustration, you can better understand how to produce circles of light.

The episodes we see in the photo at the bottom of the news can say a lot: not only They tell us a lot about the behavior of black holesBut it also gives us an idea of ​​the cosmic ocean that surrounds these cosmic monsters.

What should not deceive us is the inexpressive “depth” in the photo: although the circles appear to be on the same plane, they are in fact arranged and spread all the way between the ground and the V404 Cygni. The largest circles are the “closest” to our planet, while the thinnest are the farthest.

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/U.Wisc-Madison/S. Heinz et al./IR: Pan-STARRS.