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 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.”
