WASHINGTON — NASA's newest project is on a mission to understand black holes. <br /><br />Black holes are the giant light-sucking space monsters that usually play the villain in sci-fi movies. But they are still widely misunderstood.<br /><br />NASA is hoping to change that with their new NICER mission.<br /><br />Currently, researchers are studying light echoes surrounding a black hole 10,000 light years away from Earth. NASA reports that the stellar-mass black hole is called MAXI J1820+070, or J1820, and it's currently absorbing material from a nearby star. The black hole is 10 times larger than our sun.<br /><br />J1820 hadn't been in NASA's radar until May 2018, when Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency's Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image investigation detected an outburst of light emanating from the black hole.<br /><br />J1820's sudden outburst allowed NASA to examine how the corona and disk of the black hole changes as it consumes material from the neighboring star.<br /><br />Using a tool called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, researchers were able to observe "light echoes" of x-ray light bouncing off the swirling gas near J1820 that was changing the black hole's environment size and shape.<br /><br />Let us explain where these x-ray lights come from and why they matter.<br /><br />Black holes can act like giant funnels, absorbing materials from nearby stars into a ring called an accretion disk, which is the gas and materials surrounding black holes.<br /><br />The accretion disc is incredibly hot. Its heat allows it to create x-rays in the areas closer to the black hole. Fluctuations and movement in the disc can cause outbursts.<br /><br />The corona is an even hotter region of subatomic particles that emit higher-energy x-rays.<br /><br />Since J1820's outburst, researchers found another anomaly. Its corona had shrunk from 160 kilometers to just 16 kilometers. Although the origin of the x-ray lights can be explained, the cause of the sudden outburst and fluctuations still remain a mystery.<br /><br />Using NICER, NASA can observe these lights and study them to understand why black holes behave the way they do.
