The universe is big and often very weird. While humans have been studying space for as long as we have been around, and we have learned a lot (especially in the last century). Even the smartest astronomers, however, will freely admit that there is still a lot that we don’t understand.

One specific area where scientists have a lot to learn is when it comes to black holes, and there is currently an event going on that is letting them collect a lot of new data. An object nicknamed Ansky (it’s ‘scientific’ name is SDSS1335+0728, so let’s just use the nickname) is something that we’ve never observed before. Specifically, it is a supermassive blackhole that is in the process of waking up.

It was first seen in 2019 emitting bursts of X-ray light. These bursts came at regular intervals called quasi-periodic eruptions. As of now, experts have no idea what is causing them. Astronomers have been studying this blackhole, and recently wrote a paper on it, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

In a statement about the paper, lead author Lorena Hernandez-Garcia, who is a researcher at Valparaiso University, said:

“This rare event provides an opportunity for astronomers to observe a black hole’s behaviour in real time, using X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and NASA’s NICER, Chandra and Swift. This phenomenon is known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPE. 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. The first QPE episode was discovered in 2019, and since then we’ve only detected a handful more. We don’t yet understand what causes them. Studying Ansky will help us to better understand black holes and how they evolve.”

There are known causes for these bursts, including when a star is ripped apart while being absorbed into a blackhole. They can also steadily emit the X-ray energy when material is being pulled in past the accretion disk. Neither of these two known causes seem to be the case with Ansky. Joheen Chakraborty is a team member and PhD student at MIT, and added the following to the statement on the paper:

“The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE. Each of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere. Ansky’s eruptions also show the longest cadence ever observed, of about 4.5 days. This pushes our models to their limits and challenges our existing ideas about how these X-ray flashes are being generated.”

To put it simply, what is being observed is really testing the limits of the models that have been set up for what we might expect to see. This is not exactly surprising since a lot of what the models are based on are more theory than actual observation. Having the opportunity to observe a supermassive blackhole ‘waking up’ like this will undoubtedly add a lot of data to what is available, which can then be used to update the models.

ESA Research Fellow and X-ray astronomer, Erwan Quintin, also added to the statement on the study that looked at this blackhole, saying:

“For QPEs, we’re still at the point where we have more models than data, and we need more observations to understand what’s happening. We thought that QPEs were the result of small celestial objects being captured by much larger ones and spiralling down towards them. Ansky’s eruptions seem to be telling us a different story. These repetitive bursts are also likely associated with gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission LISA might be able to catch. It’s crucial to have these X-ray observations that will complement the gravitational wave data and help us solve the puzzling behavior of massive black holes.”

So, to put it simply, we are learning a lot about something that astronomers only really had theories on before. This is undoubtedly very exciting, and will likely trigger a lot of additional research into this important field.

I’d love to see a supermassive blackhole waking up.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.