Supermassive black hole, inactive so far, awakens: NASA

A supermassive black hole, inactive so far, has awakened in the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, American space agency NASA has revealed

[Representative image created by Grok 3]

Washington: A supermassive black hole, inactive so far, has awakened in the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, American space agency NASA has revealed.

The inactive black hole located 300 million light-years away at the heart of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 was seen erupting with the longest and most powerful X-ray blasts ever seen from such a cosmic titan, NASA said.

“Ansky”

The start of the supermassive black hole devouring matter around it and erupting with short-lived flaring events called quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs) is marked by this active phase, reported Space.com.

The black hole is responsible for a region at the heart of its galaxy called an "active galactic nucleus," or "AGN."

The team has dubbed this AGN "Ansky."

In late 2019, the awakening of Anksy was first detected, alerting astronomers who followed up on its manifestation with Nasa's Swift X-ray space telescope.

Astronomers had begun to see the black hole powering Ansky erupting with flares at fairly regular intervals by February 2024.

"The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE," team member Joheen Chakraborty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said in a statement.

"Each of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere. Ansky's eruptions also show the longest cadence ever observed, of about 4.5 days. This pushes our models to their limits and challenges our existing ideas about how these X-ray flashes are being generated,” the team member added.

About Black Hole

The popular perception of a black hole is that of a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sitting in space constantly slurping up everything around it. This is only part of the rich and complex existence of the densest known objects in the Universe. Like anything with mass, their gravitational reach only extends so far, ScienceAlert said.

Supermassive black holes can go through periods of raging activity, and periods of relative quiet, during which they just sort of sit there not really accreting much material at all. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for instance, is relatively quiescent.

The light detected emanating from Ansky, however, is not easy to explain. It's extremely bright across a range of wavelengths, from infrared to X-rays, and the eruptions last longer than predicted for a cosmic interloper. This is tremendously exciting… but it does mean that we're going to need a lot more data, according to ScienceAlert.

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