Analysis reveals a tiny black hole repeatedly punching through a larger black hole’s disk of gas. At the heart of a far-off galaxy, a supermassive black hole appears to have had a case of the hiccups. Astronomers from MIT, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have found that a previously q
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The unexpected awakening of these previously “asleep” black holes could tell us more about the smallest supermassive black holes in the universe, if you consider small to mean anywhere between 100,000 and 10 million times the mass of our Sun.
“Most of the smaller galaxies out there are usually missed in our searches because they are fainter,” Arcodia, who led a study recently published in
Nature, told SYFY WIRE. “The co-evolution of supermassive black holes with their host galaxies is usually more known and studied for galaxies bigger than the Milky Way and black holes more massive than the one at its center.”
Up until a beautiful May evening in 2019 at Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, Sagittarius A (Sgr A ), the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole was usually a passive flickering object that appeared like a massive, dormant volcano or a sleeping monster. But suddenly Sgr A , located twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, brightened 75-fold. “The black hole is always variable,” observed astronomer Tuan Do, “but this was the brightest we’ve seen in the infrared so far. It was probably even brighter before we started observing that night!”
“The black hole was so bright I at first mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sgr A that bright,” Do said in an interview with ScienceAlert.