One of the best ways to study black holes is to observe the fireworks that occur when matter falls onto them. As material in the surrounding accretion disk (illustrated in the figure) gets heated and ionized into plasma, it emits x rays whose spectra embody the black hole’s properties, such as mass and spin. But so long as the vicinity of a stellar black hole cannot be directly resolved, the models that make sense of the spectra must rely on assumptions that can be directly tested only by re-creating an astrophysical plasma in the lab and measuring it.
Now Guillaume Loisel of Sandia National Laboratories and colleagues have done just that with Sandia’s Z machine. The powerhouse x-ray source blasted dime-sized samples of silicon, a suitable analogue for the iron that dominates the line emission from accretion disks. After isolating the silicon emission, which was 10–7 as bright as the triggering pulse, Loisel and colleagues found that the spectrum resembled those measured from plasmas swirling around black holes and x-ray binaries.
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