Black Holes' Glowing Crowns: A New Look

Ever heard of black holes having crowns? Well, they do! These crowns, called coronas, are super-hot plasma regions around black holes. NASA's IXPE spacecraft recently studied 12 black holes to figure out what these coronas look like and how they're connected to the swirling disks of matter around the black holes. Surprisingly, it turns out that both small and huge black holes have coronas with similar shapes, even though the black holes are very different in size. This is like finding out that both tiny and giant dogs have similar-looking fluffy tails!The researchers used a clever trick called X-ray polarization to look at the coronas. It's like studying the sun's corona during a solar eclipse. The coronas were found to be stretched out in the same direction as the swirling disks of matter. This is the first time scientists have seen that black holes of different sizes have coronas with similar structures. Isn't that cool? Some of the black holes studied were really close, like Cygnus X-1 and Cygnus X-3, which are about 7, 000 and 37, 000 light-years away. Others were much farther, like the one at the center of the Circinus galaxy, which is about 13 million light-years away. Even though these black holes are so different in size, their coronas look similar. This is great news for scientists, as they can now learn more about far-away supermassive black holes by studying smaller ones that are closer to home.