Daniel Amoils

Black holes are extremely massive objects that are some of the strangest known things in the universe. Black holes have disks of hot gas around them, known as an accretion disk, that emit light. There is also a cloud of hotter material near the black hole called the corona that energizes some of the light from the accretion disk. We don’t know the exact shape of this corona and where exactly it is located in relation to the black hole and the accretion disk. 

I attempted to help reveal some of this by using data from a telescope that can measure the polarization of X-rays from black holes. Polarization describes the direction in which a light wave oscillates. By fitting the polarization data with new models, we can account for the shape of the corona. Prior research found that the corona is horizontally extended in the disk’s plane, but it did not account for the contribution to the polarization made by some of the light that is reflected off the disk after being energized in the corona. 

My project accounts for this using a new model called kynstokes and finds that the corona is still likely extended horizontally. This allows us to develop new models using this coronal geometry and to study black holes and learn more about our universe.