[Press Release] Understanding the last 1/100 seconds before falling into a black hole

Shinya Yamada has found that an accreting gas falling into a black hole is heated instantly within 1/100 seconds, by applying a shot analysis technique into the Suzaku HXD data taken from a famous black hole binary Cygnus X-1. Further improvements on this study is expected from the next to Suzaku satellite, ASTRO-H, and the first X-ray polarimetry mission, GEMS. The details are presented at http://www.riken.jp/pr/press/2013/20130404_2/#note8 though only Japanese version is available.