Astronomers have for the first time managed to watch a supermassive black hole wake up and burn at the heart of its galaxy, the European Southern Observatory reported Tuesday.
Located in the Virgo constellation, 300 million light-years from Earth, the galaxy had been quiet for several decades until late 2019, when it suddenly began to shine brighter than ever before.
The centre of the galaxy – where a supermassive black hole is thought to sit – has been emitting a variety of rays ever since.
“This behavior is unprecedented,” Paula Sánchez Saez, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and first author of the new study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in a statement.
Study co-author Lorena Hernández García said the “most convincing option” to explain the glow is that astronomers were observing “the activation of a massive black hole in real time.”
Most galaxies – including our own – are thought to have a supermassive black hole at their centre.
These cosmic behemoths are by definition invisible – even light can't escape their awesome power.
The only way we can see black holes is when they destroy a massive object that gives off light as it dies: such as a star that got too close and shattered into pieces.
“These giant monsters usually sleep,” said study co-author Claudio Ricci.
But for the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, “we were able to observe the awakening of the supermassive black hole, (which) suddenly started to feed on the gas available around it, and became very bright,” the astrophysicist said.
Initial observations suggest that this black hole has a mass 1.5 million times that of the Sun, enough to classify it as a supermassive black hole.
But that's still light, since the true heavyweight planets easily have masses over a billion times the Sun's mass.
An international team of astronomers is analysing data from multiple telescopes to determine whether the black hole's activity is temporary – possibly caused by an explosion of a star – or whether it will remain active for a long time.
“This is something that could also happen with Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in our galaxy,” Hernández García said.
But luckily, our own black hole is fast asleep.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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