Deep beneath the Earth’s surface, in a layer called the mantle, heat builds up and pulses, causing rock to slowly rise toward the crust. This movement is known as a mantle upwelling, and it plays a major role in forming volcanoes, breaking continents apart, and even creating new ocean basins. In East Africa, the Afar Depression is famous among geologists …
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A black hole’s bizarre “heartbeat” is forcing astronomers to reconsider how these cosmic heavyweights behave. Observations of IGR J17091-3624 — a black hole in a binary system roughly 28,000 light-years from Earth — were taken using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Nicknamed the “heartbeat” black hole for its dramatic, rhythmic pulses in brightness, the object feeds on matter stolen …
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Written by Michael Allen An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), has challenged our understanding of what happens to matter in the direct vicinity of a black hole. With IXPE, astronomers can study incoming X-rays and measure the polarization, a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field. The polarization degree is …
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