At MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Professor Erin Kara is advancing the technique of X-ray reverberation mapping to study supermassive black holes. By measuring the echoes produced when X-rays from a black hole’s corona bounce off the surrounding accretion disk, her team is reconstructing the environment immediately outside the event horizon and learning how black holes grow.
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Erin Kara
MIT professor of astrophysics