Nature Astronomy publishes black hole research by JMU physicist

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black hole research by Keigo Fugumura

Keigo Fukumura, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is the lead author on a paper about black hole winds published in Nature Astronomy on Monday, March 6.

Titled, “Magnetic origin of black hole winds across the mass scale,” Fukumura says the research presents an X-ray analysis of accretion disk winds from a black hole.

Here’s a bit of an abstract: In general, black hole accretion disks are believed to be accompanied by ionized outflows in the form of a series of blue-shifted absorption features in the X-ray spectrum. The presence of these X-ray outflows is indeed ubiquitous among luminous active galaxies that host supermassive black holes, as well as black hole binary systems, but they are diverse, for example, in their energetics, ranging from non-relativistic to near-relativistic speeds. In this paper we demonstrate theoretically, based on the first principle, that the magnetically-driven disk-wind scenario for luminous galaxies can also successfully explain the outflows detected in a stellar-mass black hole binary system, GRO J1655-40. Our models explicitly provide a theoretical support for its magnetic-origin (consistent with earlier observational claims) and indicate the notion of a universal magnetic structure of the observed winds across all known black hole masses.

The full article is available at http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0062.

An article about the paper in sciencenews.org, “Magnetism helps black holes blow off gas,” can be found here.

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Published: Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Last Updated: Thursday, November 2, 2023

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