To blink
A distant supermassive black hole appears to have rebooted, into a cosmic flaw so surprising that it would leave The Matrix architects baffled.
Astronomers observing the black hole watched as its corona, the incredibly bright ring of particles that surrounds its event horizon, disappeared over the course of a year. Then, even more confusingly, it reappeared, as if the entire black hole was turned off and on again.
Heavenly Phoenix
In just one year, which is insanely fast on a celestial time scale, the crown was dimmed 10,000 times. Then, in a few months, he formed a new one that is now almost as bright as the original.
“We expect luminosity changes of this size to vary over time scales of many thousands to millions of years,” MIT physicist Erin Kara said in a press release. “But on this object, we saw it change by 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is totally unknown and really mind-blowing.”
Gummed
Scientists suspect something damaged the works: According to research published Thursday in The letters of the astrophysical journalThe black hole may have eaten up a star that stuck everything like a monkey wrench stuck in the gears of a machine.
“This will be really important in understanding how a black hole corona is heated and fed in the first place,” added Kara.
READ MORE: At first astronomers see the crown of a black hole disappear and then reappear [MIT]
More about black holes: Astronomers find the closest black hole to Earth, and it’s strange
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