About 10,000 light years away from Earth, a black hole is engaged in a stellar feast

About 10,000 light years away from Earth, a
black hole is engaged in a stellar feast,
devouring the gases of a nearby star -- and
we've been watching.
The stellar-mass black hole, around 10 times
more massive than our sun, was discovered
after a humongous X-ray flare in March 2018.
It was originally detected by a specialized
instrument aboard the International Space
Station, operated by the Japanese Aerospace
and Exploration Agency, known as the Monitor
of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI). After the X-ray
burst captivated astronomers, researchers at
MIT, the University of Maryland and NASA
swung another instrument on board the station
to watch what happened to the black hole,
nicknamed J1820.
It's embarrassing when people watch you eat,
but J1820 was none the wiser as NASA swung
the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer
(NICER) to monitor its buffet. NICER continued
to detect waves of X-ray light bouncing away
from the black hole, called "light echoes",
which demonstrated how the black hole's size
and shape was changing over time.
"NICER has allowed us to measure light echoes
closer to a stellar-mass black hole than ever
before," said first author Erin Kara.
The research, published on Jan. 10 in Nature,
provides some tantalizing new evidence about
the way a black hole evolves once it gobbles
up a star. The major takeaway for the team
was the the black hole's corona was shrinking.