NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with the team at Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, managed to capture a set of mesmerizing rings around a black hole. The X-ray images of these giant rings detail information about the dust located in our galaxy, using a similar principle to what is performed in doctor’s offices as well as by airport security.
This spectacular black hole is actually a part of a binary system called V404 Cygni, which is located about 7,800 light years away from Earth. The binary system consists of an early K giant star companion with a mass slightly smaller than the Sun. Both star and the black hole orbit each other every 6.47129 days at fairly close range, thus causing the former to lose mass to an accretion disk around the black hole and eventually to the black hole itself. In case you ever wondered what a black hole sounds like, NASA Sonification has that taken care of.
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The black hole is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object. This material glows in X-rays, so astronomers refer to these systems as ‘X-ray binaries,'” said NASA.
