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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Adam IngramORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© The Author(s) 2026.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.
Author(s): You B, Yu W, Ingram A, De Marco B, Qu J-L, Zhu Z-H, Santangelo A, Xu S-E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Communications
Year: 2026
Volume: 17
Issue: 1
Print publication date: 26/03/2026
Online publication date: 17/02/2026
Acceptance date: 03/02/2026
Date deposited: 14/04/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2041-1723
Publisher: Nature Research
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69604-9
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69604-9
Data Access Statement: All Insight-HXMT data used (Proposal ID: P0114661) are publicly available and can be downloaded from the Insight-HXMT website (http://archive.hxmt.cn/proposal). The NICER datasets analyzed during this study are available at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center(https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/FTP/nicer/data/obs/). The data generated in this study are publicly available at: https://github.com/MAXIJ1820/generate_data. Source data are provided with this paper. The Insight-HXMT data reduction was performed using software available from the Insight-HXMT website (http://hxmten.ihep.ac.cn/). The time lag was performed with Stingray, a reliable Python library for X-ray timing analysis (see https://stingray.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html). The model PROPFLUC can be downloaded from the website: https://github.com/HEASARC/xspec_localmodels/tree/master/propfluc. The new model presented here, reltransCpF, can be downloaded from https://github.com/reltrans/Youetal2025
PubMed id: 41702894
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