For years, scientists have thought that the galaxy SDSS 1335+0728 was as remarkable as its serial number.
Then it did something that scientists had never seen a galaxy do: suddenly, this frankly forgotten space Our neighbors 300 million light years away turned on their lights. This happened nearly five years ago, and things have gotten brighter since then.
Astronomers believe they just witnessed a supermassive object black holethe sleeping giant its galactic center, awakening. Before, no one had ever seen a black hole awaken while it was happening.
“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years and it always appears calm and inactive,” European Southern Observatory astronomer Paula Sanchez Sass said in a statement. “Suddenly, it of [core] Dramatic changes in brightness began to occur, unlike any typical event we had seen before.
Astronomers are used to observing Individual stars suddenly brighten or dim. Other galaxies are even known to have brief outbursts After the supernova explosion or a The black hole inside it ate a star, but these attacks usually last only a few days or months. Using multiple ground-based and space-based telescopes, a team of scientists observed an entire galaxy lighting up and then remaining bright for years later, unprecedentedly, including NASAof the Swift and Chandra X-ray Observatories.
This new star is on the verge of exploding. You can see it anytime now.
Sánchez Sáez is the main author of the book New discoverywhich appears in Astronomy and Astrophysics Magazine.
Black holes are one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. They don’t have surfaces like planets or stars. Instead, they have aevent horizon,” or a point from which there is no return. If anything flies too close, it will fall in and never escape the black hole’s gravity.
Mix and match speed of light
The most common, called stellar black holes, are thought to be the result of the death of a massive star in a supernova explosion. The stars then collapse on themselves and their material condenses into relatively small regions.
“These giant monsters are usually asleep and cannot be seen directly.”
but how supermassive black holeIts mass is millions to billions of times greater than that of the sun, and its shape is even more elusive. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe that these invisible giants lurk at the centers of nearly all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations discovered supported the theory Supermassive black holes begin in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars gather rapidly, but scientists are still figuring it out.
An artist’s impression of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy brightening in two images, “before” at the top and “after” at the bottom.
Image credit: ESO / Illustration by M. Kornmesser
To better understand the increased brightness of SDSS 1335+0728, the team looked at archival data and new observations of the galaxy before and after the December 2019 mutation. , optical and infrared wavelengths, but since February this year it has even started emitting X-rays.
“These giant monsters are usually sleeping and cannot be seen directly,” co-author Claudio Ricci of the University of Diego Portales in Chile said in a statement. “In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe to the awakening of massive black holes, [which] Suddenly starts absorbing the available gas around it and becomes very bright.
The team plans to continue research and rule out other potential explanations. Some believe the galaxy’s brightening could be the result of an unusually long tidal disruption event, which occurs when a star gets too close to a black hole and is violently torn apart. Perhaps the reason is that there are other never-recorded phenomena waiting to be discovered.
The first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Image source: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
About half a century ago, black holes weren’t even generally accepted science. Now they got theirs photos taken Consists of a series of giant synchronized radio antennas on Earth. Humanity has just seen the Milky Way’s own central black hole, Sagittarius A*, for the first time in 2022.
Figuring out what’s going on with the SDSS 1335+0728 black hole could give scientists an idea of whether something similar could happen in our galactic home.
Regardless of the nature of the change, this distant galaxy “provides valuable information about how black holes grow and evolve,” Sánchez Sás said.
