Question

When one member of a binary star system is a black hole, and astronomers detect flickering x-rays coming from the system, where are these x-rays usually coming from?

Answer 1

When one member of a binary star system is a black hole, and astronomers detect flickering x-rays coming from the system, these x-rays usually coming from a disk of material around the black hole (material that has been pulled from the companion star and is falling toward the black hole).

A binary black hole (BBH) is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into stellar binary black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture; and binary supermassive black holes, believed to be a result of galactic mergers.

For many years, proving the existence of binary black holes was made difficult because of the nature of black holes themselves and the limited means of detection available.

However, in the event that a pair of black holes were to merge, an immense amount of energy should be given off as gravitational waves, with distinctive waveforms that can be calculated using general relativity.

Therefore, during the late 20th and early 21st century, binary black holes became of great interest scientifically as a potential source of such waves and a means by which gravitational waves could be proven to exist. Binary black hole mergers would be one of the strongest known sources of gravitational waves in the universe, and thus offer a good chance of directly detecting such waves.

As the orbiting black holes give off these waves, the orbit decays, and the orbital period decreases. This stage is called binary black hole inspiral. The black holes will merge once they are close enough. Once merged, the single hole settles down to a stable form, via a stage called ringdown, where any distortion in the shape is dissipated as more gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second the black holes can reach extremely high velocity, and the gravitational wave amplitude reaches its peak.

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