This behavior of the black hole amazed scientists. “We don't know what causes them yet”

Astronomers had no pretext before to be interested galaxy SDSS1335+0728, which is located 300 million light years from Earth in the constellation of the Virgin. However, in 2019, the galaxy suddenly began to shine with the brightness, which caught the attention of some telescopes. In February last year, Chilean astronomers began to notice regular x -ray explosion from this galaxy. According to research published on Friday in the journal “Nature Astronomy”, it was a sign that a sleeping black galaxy hole was awakening from sleep.

Most galaxies, including our native Milky Way, have a super -massive black hole in the center. These invisible monsters absorb everything that is on their way, even light. When a star is near the object, it will be torn to shreds. The fragmented matter of the star becomes a stream that quickly spinning around the black hole, creating a so -called accretion disk, which is gradually “swallowed”.

Black holes can also go through long periods of inactivity when they do not attract matter. After a fairly calm period, a bright, compact area in the heart of the SDSS1335+0728 galaxy was classified as a “active galactic nucleus” and received the nickname Ansky.

As reported by the astronomer Lorena Hernandez-Garcia from the Chilean University of Valparaiso, “this rare event gives the opportunity to observe the behavior of the black hole in real time” using several X-ray telescopes.

Short -term X -ray flares coming out of the black Ansky hole are called quasiperiodic eruptions, in short QPE.

– For the first time we observed this type of event in the Black Hole, which seems to wake up. We do not know what causes them yet – said Hernandez -Garcia.

The current theory assumes that QPE is associated with accretion disks that form after swallowing the stars by black holes. However, there is no indication that a similar event took place near Ansky. And those flashes are quite unusual.

“Explosions of X -rays from a black hole named Ansky are 10 times longer and 10 times brighter than those we see in the case of typical QPE. Each of these eruptions releases a hundred times more energy than any other that we saw elsewhere” – said Jaheen Chakhaborta in a press statement, a doctoral student from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and member research team. He added that there are 4.5 days between the explosions, which is the longest period of this type that has ever been observed. “This leads our models to the limit and undermines our existing concepts about how to generate these flares,” he supplemented.

Astronomers had to come up with a few theories about what could cause these strange flares. One of them says that the accretion disk was created by gas sucked into a black hole, which emits X -rays only if a small blue object, such as a star, crosses its path.

– It is enough to imagine a black hole and a disk around it – said Norbert Schartel in an interview with the AFP news agency, the main scientist of the XMM -Newton Scientific Satellite of the European Space Agency, which Ansky watched. – Now imagine that the star crosses the disk twice every time it circulates in orbit – firing flashes – but at a certain angle, which means that there is no really strong force that would pull it in – he added.

However, there is no certainty, which is responsible for this unusual phenomenon.

“We need more observations to understand what is going on there,” said Erwan Quintin.