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.

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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

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article

Reverberation lags viewed in hard X-rays from an accreting stellar-mass black hole

Barbara De Marco, Sai-En Xu, Qu Jin-lu, Bei You et al.
Nature Communications
Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
article

Reverberation lags viewed in hard X-rays from an accreting stellar-mass black hole

Barbara De Marco, Sai-En Xu, Qu Jin-lu, Bei You, Zong-Hong Zhu, Adam Ingram, Wei Yu
article en

Abstract

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.

Nature CommunicationsVol. 17(1)
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)
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Openalex Percentile: Top 52%
Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
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