28-07-2025
Indian scientists decode mysterious signal pattern coming from deep space
India's space observatory AstroSat has uncovered new clues about the mysterious behaviour of a distant black hole, GRS 1915+105, revealing how it flickers in X-rays with remarkable 28,000 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy, this black hole system is helping scientists decode the extreme environment near one of the universe's most powerful its launch in 2015, AstroSat — India's first dedicated multi-wavelength space telescope — has been continuously monitoring GRS 1915+105. A team of Indian scientists from ISRO, IIT Guwahati, and the University of Haifa used two of its onboard instruments, the Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) and the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), to study the black hole's mysterious signal
They found a repeating pattern: a few hundred seconds of dim X-ray light, followed by a similar period of bright light. During the brighter phases, they discovered something remarkable — fast X-ray flickers occurring 70 times per second, known as Quasi-periodic Oscillations (QPOs). These flickers vanished during the dimmer team traced this rapid flickering to the corona, a superheated cloud of plasma surrounding the black hole. During the bright phases, the corona becomes smaller and hotter, generating strong the dim phases, it cools and expands, causing the flickers to black hole is part of a binary system, pulling matter from a companion star into a hot spinning disc. As this matter heats up, it emits X-rays — the signals that AstroSat study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides scientists with a deeper insight into black hole findings showcase India's growing capabilities in space-based astronomy and the powerful role of AstroSat as a cosmic observatory.- EndsTrending Reel
