What can astronomers learn from observing black holes that suddenly wake up? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated what a black hole looks like when it goes active and starts accumulating matter in its environment. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the peculiar nature of black holes, which remains one of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe.
For the study, the researchers observed a black hole residing at the center of SDSS1335+0728, which is located approximately 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This study builds on observations first made in 2019 of activity of this particular black hole, which was nicknamed “Ansky”, and has since been designated as an active galactic nucleus. But new observations made in 2024 revealed Ansky was emitting X-ray bursts regularly, and the astronomers pounced at the chance to observe a black hole waking up, so to speak.
“This rare event provides an opportunity for astronomers to observe a black hole’s behavior in real time, using X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and NASA’s NICER, Chandra and Swift,” said Dr. Lorena Hernández-García, who is a researcher at Valparaiso University in Chile and lead author of the study. “This phenomenon is known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPE. QPEs are short-lived flaring events. And this is the first time we have observed such an event in a black hole that seems to be waking up.”
Artist’s rendition of a celestial object interacting with a black hole’s disc, which researchers hypothesize could be causing massive X-ray bursts. (Credit: European Space Agency)
While QPEs are often associated with black holes consuming a nearby star, the researchers ruled out this possibility after carefully analyzing the data. Despite Ansky giving off far more energy than traditional QPEs, they concluded the massive X-rays could be from another object interacting with the disc orbiting the black hole.
This study provides astronomers with a rare opportunity to watch a black hole waking up and being active in real time and could help astronomers gain greater insight into the formation and evolution of black holes, whose destructive power can destroy stars and anything that gets drawn into its immense gravity.
What new discoveries about waking black holes in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Nature Astronomy, European Space Agency, EurekAlert!
