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ASTROPHYSICS
What happens to gas as it falls into a black hole?
One of the biggest misconceptions about black holes is that they indiscriminately suck up everything around them. A black hole is incredibly small, and so gas on a collision course with a black hole would need to have incredibly precise aim in order to directly hit the black hole. Instead gas starts orbiting around the black hole, eventually creating what we call an ‘accretion disc’. As gas funnels closer and closer to the black hole, the gravitational potential energy that the gas had is released. This then dissipates in the form of heat, radiation, massive outflows and sometimes jets of particles moving at close to the speed of light. One question we want to answer is: where does all of the X-ray emission come from around a black hole?
High-energy X-rays are ubiquitous in accreting black holes, and yet we don’t understand the mechanism that
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