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The term black hole doesn’t exactly lend itself to people thinking that it is actually really bright. And, technically speaking, black holes themselves are areas where nothing, even light, can escape, so they are quite dark.
Just outside the event horizon of a black hole, however, there is often a lot of light because stars and other objects being pulled in end up exploding or going through other transformations that involve huge amounts of energy and light being given off.
One particular black hole named AT2018hyz (also named Jetty McJetface by the Internet) is not just giving off a lot of light due to the stars it is consuming, but it is getting brighter.
In 2018, this supermassive black hole was observed destroying a star, causing the emission of a lot of light. This is pretty normal and is caused by what is called a tidal disruption event.
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When researchers went back and observed AT2018hyz again, however, they noticed that the light was getting brighter. More recent observations show that it is now 50 times brighter than it was in 2019, and according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, it seems to be getting even brighter with every passing day. In a statement on the study, lead author Yvette Cendes, an astrophysicist at the University of Oregon, said:
“This is really unusual. I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything rising like this over such a long period of time.”
The first time that researchers thought that this supermassive black hole was unusual was in 2022 when they took note that it just kept getting brighter. While bright flashes from exploding stars can create a lot of light, it is usually short lived (on a cosmic scale) and doesn’t continue to get brighter over the course of years. Cendes added:
“If you have an explosion, why would you expect there to be something years after the explosion happened when you didn’t see something before?”
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As of the time of the study’s publication, AT2018hyz has become one of the brightest known objects in the cosmos, and seems to still be getting brighter. How long this will continue is unknown, and researchers are now looking to study other supermassive black holes to see if this is happening in other places.
Finding additional examples of this type of event could help them to determine what is causing it, and just how common it might be.
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