Reverberation lags viewed in hard X-rays from an accreting stellar-mass black hole
The X-ray-emitting corona near a black hole (BH) is too small to be directly imaged, but the rapid variability is used to infer the geometry by measuring time lags caused by coronal X-rays reflecting off the disk, known as reverberation lags. Though reverberation lags have previously been detected for some supermassive BHs in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), detecting them from stellar-mass BHs poses much greater challenges due to their size being over a million times smaller. Previous measurements of reverberation lags for stellar-mass BHs were limited to energies below 10 keV. Here, we report the detection of the Compton hump reverberation, peaking at about 30 keV, from an X-ray binary. The accompanying detection of an iron line feature at about 6.4 keV confirms the X-ray reverberation scenario and provides strong evidence that accretion flows in AGNs and X-ray binaries are governed by an ubiquitous process.
Authors
- Barbara De Marco
- Sai-En Xu
- Qu Jin-lu
- Bei You
- Zong-Hong Zhu
- Adam Ingram
- Wei Yu
Institutions
- Wuhan University of Technology (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Beijing Normal University (CN)
- Wuhan University (CN)
- Institute of High Energy Physics (CN)
- University of Tübingen (DE)
- Newcastle University (GB)
- Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (NL)
- Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (ES)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2026-02-17
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69604-9
- Primary Topic
- Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China