A newly observed monster black hole has burst into life, emitting X-ray blasts that are releasing a hundred times more energy than scientists have ever seen before. The supermassive black hole, located about 300 million light-years away from Earth, was previously inactive but is now actively devouring matter around it and erupting with short-lived flaring events called quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs).
The team detected the outbursts using NASA’s Swift X-ray space telescope and followed up with data from other missions such as the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, NASA’s NICE and Chandra, and archival data from eROSITA. The observations revealed that the black hole is releasing bursts of X-rays that are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than typical QPEs.
“This pushes our models to their limits and challenges our existing ideas about how these X-ray flashes are being generated,” said Joheen Chakraborty, a team member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The cause of the outbursts remains unclear, but the team believes that they may be related to gravitational waves that could be detected by ESA’s future mission LISA.
The discovery provides a unique opportunity for scientists to monitor a feasting and erupting supermassive black hole in real time. However, more observations are needed to understand what is happening, as there is currently more model data than observational evidence. The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on March 11.
Source: https://www.space.com/the-universe/black-holes/nasa-spacecraft-spots-monster-black-hole-bursting-with-x-rays-releasing-a-hundred-times-more-energy-than-we-have-seen-elsewhere