Astronomers for the first time have observed a supermassive black hole waking up and setting the heart of its host galaxy alight, the European Southern Observatory said on Tuesday.
The galaxy 300 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo constellation had been quiet for decades until late 2019, when it suddenly began to shine brighter than ever before.
The center of the galaxy — where a supermassive black hole is believed to be — since then has been radiating a variety of rays.
Photo: AFP / European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser
“This behavior is unprecedented,” Paula Sanchez Saez, an European Southern Observatory astronomer and first author of a new study in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in a statement.
The “most tangible option” to explain this brightening is that the astronomers were watching “the activation of a massive black hole in real time,” study coauthor Lorena Hernandez Garcia said.
Most galaxies — including our own Milky Way — are believed to have a supermassive black hole at their center.
These cosmic behemoths are by definition invisible — not even light can escape their gravity.
The only way to observe black holes is when they destroy something huge that lets off light in its death throes, such as a star that wandered too close being torn apart.
“These giant monsters usually are sleeping,” study coauthor Claudio Ricci said.
However, for galaxy SDSS1335+0728, “we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, [which] suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright,” Ricci said.
Initial observations indicate that the black hole has 1.5 million times more mass than the sun, enough for it to be classified as a supermassive black hole, but it is still on the lighter side, as the true heavyweights easily exceed 1 billion times the sun’s mass.
The international team of astronomers is analyzing data from telescopes, hoping to determine whether the black hole’s activity is short term — perhaps caused by a star being ripped apart — or whether it would continue for a long time.
“This is something that could happen also to our own Sgr A* [Sagittarius A*],” the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Hernandez Garcia said.
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