The intervening galaxy refracts and amplifies light from the background quasar RX J1131, creating four separate images (shown in pink). Tiny flickers in these images allowed astronomers to directly measure the size of the black hole's superheated “corona” for the first time, finding that it spans roughly the size of our solar system. (Image credit: X-rays: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/RCReis et al; optical beams: NASA/STScI)
Black holes may be invisible, but their environments are not. For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the superheated “corona” surrounding one of these cosmic giants.
The supermassive black hole RX J1131 is about 6 billion light-years from Earth and spins faster than the speed of light. The monster itself, hidden, devours nearby gas and dust, heating them to millions of degrees and shining as a quasar, one of the brightest objects in the universe. Its corona, a halo of superheated gas, spans an area about 50 astronomical units, roughly the size of our solar system.
The measurement was made possible by a rare cosmic alignment in which the foreground galaxy, some 4 billion light-years from Earth, and its stars acted like two magnifying glasses stacked on top of each other, creating a “double zoom” that sharpened the view of the black hole's immediate environment.
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“This is the first time that this kind of measurement has been made,” Matus Rybak, a senior researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the study, told Live Science. “Basically, we’ve found a new way to see what’s going on in the immediate vicinity of a black hole.”
The results, detailed in a preliminary publication forthcoming in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, provide a new tool for probing the extreme conditions around black holes on scales too small to resolve with even the best telescopes.
“This doesn't look right.”
The foreground galaxy is so massive that its powerful gravity bends and amplifies the light from RX J1131, creating four separate images of the quasar thanks to a phenomenon known as strong gravitational lensing. When Rybak’s team reanalyzed a decade of data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile, they noticed tiny flickers in the brightness of these images.
“After a few days of looking at the data, we realized, ‘Okay, this doesn’t look right,’” Rybak recalls. “It’s not even my main area of research, but it became a sort of pet project that we kept doing.”
If the source of these changes were around the black hole itself, all the images would have become brighter and dimmer at the same time. However, follow-up observations in 2022, taken just a day apart, showed that the images were flickering independently of each other.
“This is irrefutable evidence – there must be something like this,” Rybak said.
That “something” is microlensing, in which individual stars in the foreground galaxy act like tiny lenses, briefly magnifying different parts of the quasar’s corona. The authors of the new study note that because the corona is so compact, these small-scale enhancements are what produce the independent flickering seen in the images.
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“We saw this flickering in the data that we couldn’t explain in any other way,” Rybak told Live Science. By analyzing these flickerings, the team directly measured the width of the corona on the scale of the solar system for the first time, turning an ordinary quasar into a unique cosmic laboratory.
A New Window into Black Holes
The scientists noted in their study that the new measurement not only allows researchers to map the corona, but also opens up the potential to peer into the magnetic fields surrounding black holes.
Previous studies have shown that strong magnetic fields regulate the amount of gas coming in and out, essentially controlling how black holes grow over time. Measuring these fields directly is extremely difficult, but theoretical models suggest a link between the corona’s millimeter-wavelength emission — light emitted by fast-moving electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines — and its size and magnetic field strength.
“The key here is understanding how these black holes grow,” Rybak said.
The measurement is particularly striking because millimeter light was previously thought to be fairly static, even over months or years. “But this was one of those moments where you realize, ‘No, it’s changing, and it’s changing a lot,’” Rybak said.
To track and compare millimeter-wave radiation at different wavelengths, the team also plans to collect additional data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the only X-ray telescope with sufficient spatial resolution to detect such tiny lensed objects. However, due to proposed significant budget cuts that have sparked a furious backlash in the scientific community, the 26-year-old flagship telescope is unlikely to continue these observations.
Further progress will likely depend on ALMA expanding into lower frequency ranges, covering the wavelengths at which black hole coronas shine brightest.
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Complementing ALMA, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will excel in high-resolution optical imaging, the standard method for detecting lensed quasars like RX J1131. The telescope, whose first images were released in June, is expected to detect thousands of such systems, allowing astronomers to study optical flickering with unprecedented precision. “Rubin is going to be a game-changer for this,” Rybak said.
With ever more sensitive telescopes, astronomers are just beginning to explore the many sources twinkling in the millimeter-wave sky.
“The most interesting thing is what we don't know yet,” Rybak said.
Sharmila Kuthunur, Social Links Navigation, Live Science Contributor
Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist who specializes in astronomy and space exploration. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Astronomy, and Space.com, among other publications. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northeastern University in Boston. Follow her on BlueSky @skuthunur.bsky.social.
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