Now the material is streaming off the black hole companion, we can monitor material as it progresses closer and closer towards the black hole. This can be clearly seen in a simulation by researchers at North Carolina State University, which models material transferring between two stars. We clearly see a stream of material being stripped away from the star and spiraling in towards the other star.
Although this is a simulation of an interaction between two stars, the same physics apply to our black hole binaries. Looking more closely at the material spiraling in, we see a dim cloud-like feature around the black hole in the inner disc. This is the black hole's corona.
Astronomers have detected evidence that the corona is a cloud of fast-moving electrons that hang out near the black hole, and they think that coronas come in two flavors.
The first flavor called the lamp-post model explains the corona as a source of light that sits close to the rotational poles of the black hole.
The second model deliciously called the sandwich model, explains the corona as a larger cloud that envelops the central disc.
Think of it like this, a corona is like two halfs of the bagel surrounding the accretion disk of Nutella. Not my cup of tea, but Ross loves it.
In this artist's visualization, the corona is a diffuse purple light enveloping the black hole. The corona is thought to be powered by intense interactions between the chaotic magnetic fields generated by the material falling onto the black hole, and the resulting hot plasma.
The black hole in this artist's rendering is located in the center of the galaxy Markarian 335, in the direction of the constellation Pegasus. Observations of the supermassive black hole have revealed powerful coronal outbursts that accelerate materials nearly 20 percent of the speed of light.
However, we would like to emphasize that scientists are still in the very early stages of understanding the environment near the black hole. The research into the corona of black holes is ongoing.
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