For the first time, astronomers have observed the black hole at the centre of a galaxy activate in real time – and they're not sure why.
The awakening of the cosmic monster, which is a million times the mass of our Sun and located 300 million light-years away inside the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, is unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
Scientists became aware of this change when the Zwicky Transient Facility in California recorded a sudden jump in the galaxy's brightness in 2019. Follow-up observations found that the galaxy had become four times brighter in ultraviolet frequencies and was emitting 10 times more X-rays than previously thought. And it is still getting brighter four years later. The researchers will publish their findings in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics,
“Imagine you've been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seems to be quiet and inactive,” said the lead author of the study. Paula Sanchez SaezAstronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, Dr. A statement said. “Suddenly, its [core] “We start to see dramatic changes in brightness, like we've never seen before.”
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Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of most galaxies, including our own. Their enormous gravity binds dust, gas, stars and planets into a loose orbit around them. Light is unable to escape the powerful galaxies. gravitational pull Anything can be said about a black hole, but that doesn't mean it doesn't produce any black holes.
That's because the super-hot, glowing matter stripped from planets, stars, gas, dust and other black holes can swirl around the entrance to the monster's jaws at close to the speed of light. Once the plasma falls below the black hole's chasm, or event horizon, it's lost inside forever.
Scientists aren't sure what caused the sudden glow, but they suggest it's probably the result of some sort of feeding frenzy — whereby new matter rapidly heats up as it enters the black hole's clutches.
“In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of a supermassive black hole,” [which] “It suddenly began to depend on the gas available around it and became very bright,” said the study co-author. Claudio Ricci“It's a very powerful instrument,” astronomer at the University of Chile's Diego Portales said in the statement.
Another hypothesis is that astronomers are observing a phenomenon that Tidal disruption event — where a star or a ball of matter produces a flare when it is pulled in by the black hole's gravity and explodes. However, such events are typically of very short duration, lasting a few hundred days at most rather than several years.
Astronomers will now carry out further observations to discover the cause of this sudden awakening.
“Whatever be the nature of the variations, [this galaxy] “It provides valuable information about how black holes grow and evolve,” Sánchez Sáez said. Observations with state-of-the-art instruments such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile, should provide more information.