Скачать или смотреть Mr. Black Hole, Will You Go into Outburst, Please?

Most black holes are experts in how not to be seen.

In this AstroSoM, we hope to show how black holes are seen. This is the black hole GX 339–4, of the Milky Way Galaxy, constellation Ara. GX 339–4 cannot be seen. Now, we're going to ask GX 339–4 to go into outburst. GX 339–4, will you go into outburst, please?

Periodically and over the course of just days to weeks, X-ray binary systems such as GX 339–4 can go from being virtually undetectable with X-ray telescopes to becoming up to 100 times brighter. These systems remain bright for a few months, or even over a year, before fading back down to not being seen.

This AstroSoM uses data from one of the many outbursts from GX 339–4. Every saxophone note you hear is an observation taken by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. Loudness is mapped to total brightness (louder = brighter). Pitch is mapped to the relative brightness of the disk of gas around the black hole (higher notes = a stronger disk). Ten days of real time pass by with every second in the video and the complete outburst cycle lasts over 400 days.

So far, astronomers have found about two dozen black holes in outbursting X-ray binary systems. However, most of the hundreds of millions of black hole remnants thought to be littered throughout our Galaxy cannot be seen.

Sonification by: Greg Salvesen
http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~greg/

Data Credit: Salvesen et al. (2013) and RXTE
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2116

Video Credit: Gabriel Pérez, SMM (IAC)

Astronomy Sound of the Month
http://astrosom.com/