Violent flaring near the black hole MAXI J1820+070, 10,000 light years away

An animation of the black hole system MAXI J1820 070, based upon observed characteristics during a rapid accretion episode in March 2018. Purple denotes X-ray radiation seen by the NICER instrument on the ISS, and the rest of the colours show visible light seen by HiPERCAM in La Palma. The video is shown at roughly 1/10th of the true speed. The black hole is seen to feed off the companion star, drawing the material out into a vast disc of inspiralling matter. As it falls closer to the black hole itself, some of that material is shot out into energetic pencil-beam ’jets’ above and below the disc. The light here is intense enough to outshine the Sun a hundred times over can be seen to be crackling and shimmering from thousands of light years away. The actual X-ray and visible light time-series data captured appears in graphs about halfway through. X-rays likely emerge from very close to the black hole, while the visible light comes from the inner parts of the jet, after a fraction-of-a-second delay. The sys