Revealing disk-corona connections on short timescales
Niek Bollemeijer (Univ. of Amsterdam)

Black hole X-ray binaries in outburst can be very bright sources of X-rays, which are emitted mainly in two spectral components. The accretion disk dominates emission at low energies, while high energy X-rays originate from a region close to the black hole known as the corona. Despite decades of research, the nature and geometry of the corona is still subject to debate. The X-ray flux of accreting black holes has been observed to be highly variable on a broad range of timescales. The study of that variability is called X-ray spectral-timing and it can constrain models of the corona. Observations by X-ray telescopes NICER and Insight-HXMT, which cover the full X-ray band together, provide an unprecedented view of the complex variability. I will show how combining data from both telescopes leads to surprising connections between the lowest and highest X-ray energies and discuss what they may imply for the nature of the corona.

The Visitor Center program formerly known as Sunday Experiment moves to the third Saturday of the month! Join us for the first one of the fall and celebrate ICESat-2’s sixth anniversary in orbit with ICESat-2’s outreach specialists leading participants in a variety of hands-on activities.

TBD