Astronomers have seen live the awakening of a giant black hole. They had never detected something so violent

Good morning, Ansky. SDSS1335+0728 was a black hole so boring that it didn’t even have a nickname. Located 300 million light years, in the constellation of Virgo, he had been asleep from our point of view. But go aroused.

The supermassive black hole has aroused in such a violent way that it has left fascinated and somewhat baffled astronomers. Now it is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) dodged affectionately “Ansky”.

Years of study. The galaxy where Ansky is began to shine unexpectedly in visible light at the end of 2019. Chilean astronomer Paula Sánchez Sáez, of the Southern European Observatory (ESO), leads the first team that detected activation.

“When we saw Ansky illuminate in optical images, we activate monitoring observations with the NASA X -ray space telescope and review archived data of the erosite German telescope,” Paula says in a statement. “But at that time we did not see evidence of X -ray emissions.”

The surprise arrived in February 2024. A second team led by Lorena Hernández-García, from the University of Valparaíso (in Chile), saw how Ansky began to emit gusts of incredibly energy and regular X-ray. “It is the first time we observed such an event in a black hole that seems to be waking up,” Lorena explains.

Out of the ordinary. He XMM-Newton telescope From the European Space Agency it has allowed to measure the faint x -ray light that comes to us from the explosions, which has been key to measuring how much energy releases Ansky in each “flash”.

Known as “quasiperiódicas eruptions” (QPES), X -ray emissions turned out to be ten times longer and ten times luminous than other supermassive black holes. Each eruption of Ansky releases a hundred times more energy than the Qpes observed so far.

In addition, it had never seen a time between eruptions so wide, with a cadence of four and a half days. Ansky takes astronomical models to the limit and challenges our current ideas on how these flashes are generated.

What causes these explosions? The most accepted theory about the QPES is that they are caused by the interaction of an object (such as a smaller star or hole) with the accretion disc (the hot and bright material that revolves around the black hole before being engulf).

They usually occur when the Black hole is eaten a starbut it does not seem to be the case of Ansky. This has led the international astronomer team to consider other possibilities. Perhaps the accretion disk will be formed from gas captured from the galactic environment, and the flares are the result of highly energetic shock waves caused by a smaller object that orbit and disturbed repeatedly the disc.

Gravitational waves. Notice Real Time Awakening It is an unprecedented opportunity to check if their energy eruptions could be related to gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein’s relativity and detected for the first time a few years ago.

The smooth mission of ESA and NASA will try to observe these disturbances in the space-time fabric from point L1 of Lagrange after its launch in an Ariane 6 rocket planned for 2035.

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