Home » Sciences » Unkillable Star in Supermassive Black Hole Shocks Scientists!

Unkillable Star in Supermassive Black Hole Shocks Scientists!

Photo of author

By Cameron Aldridge

Unkillable Star in Supermassive Black Hole Shocks Scientists!

Photo of author

By Cameron Aldridge

Astronomers are currently probing a deep cosmic enigma centered in the depths of a remote galaxy, located about 270 million light-years away from our planet. Solving this puzzle could significantly alter our comprehension of how black holes consume matter across the cosmos.

The galaxy, identified as 1ES 1927+654 and found in the Draco constellation, houses a supermassive black hole at its center, with a mass exceeding a million suns. This characteristic, while impressive, is not uncommon as many large galaxies, including the Milky Way, contain similar massive black holes. However, this particular black hole displayed unusual behavior in 2018 when it suddenly emitted a burst of radiation powerful enough to disrupt its surrounding corona—a shell of ultra-hot plasma—for three months. Initially, astronomers suspected this might be due to a tidal disruption event, where a star gets too close and is torn apart by the black hole. Over the next few years, as the corona reformed and tranquility seemed to return, the black hole began to show even more unusual activity, including sudden flares in radio waves and quick, repetitive pulses of x-rays.

This kind of dynamic and varied activity around a supermassive black hole is unprecedented and cannot be easily explained through standard models of tidal disruption events. Eileen Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and head of an international team, studied the galaxy’s radio emissions using various terrestrial and space telescopes. Initially, Meyer regarded 1ES 1927+654 as merely a “boring, faint radio blob.” However, as the black hole exhibited more bizarre behaviors, she recognized its peculiar nature. Notably, after a significant flare in radio waves, the black hole expelled two massive jets of plasma traveling at one-third the speed of light in opposite directions—a phenomenon observed in real-time for the first time. Meyer shared these findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Md., and also authored a leading paper published on January 13 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

See also  Stop Taking Moral Advice from ChatGPT: Why It's a Bad Idea!


Supporting Scientific Journalism

If you find this article engaging, please consider supporting our high-quality journalism by subscribing. Your subscription helps ensure the continuation of impactful narratives that shape our understanding of the world.


If a straightforward stellar destruction event doesn’t explain the black hole’s odd behavior, what does? Megan Masterson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spearheaded research using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope. Masterson and her team detected oscillations in the x-ray pulses from the black hole, which accelerated over two years. The period of these oscillations halved from 18 minutes in 2022 to just seven minutes by 2024—a phenomenon never before observed around a supermassive black hole. These findings were detailed in a paper published in the February 13 edition of Nature.

The most plausible explanation for these oscillations, according to the researchers, is an indirect indication of a significant object orbiting extremely close to the black hole, plowing through its accretion disk. This disk, a swirling maelstrom of matter heated to incandescence by friction, surrounds the black hole. Each flicker in x-rays would then correspond to this object completing an orbit, disturbing the accretion disk in the process. The acceleration in oscillation frequency suggested that the orbit of this object was decaying, spiraling closer to the black hole’s event horizon due to gravitational wave emissions.

Masterson’s calculations predicted that this object would meet its end in January 2024. However, observations from March 2024 showed that the x-ray oscillations persisted, with the object orbiting perilously close to the event horizon at incredible speeds. This unexpected persistence led Masterson to speculate on alternative explanations, including the intriguing possibility of a low-mass white dwarf, which could be tough enough to temporarily withstand intense tidal forces, losing mass in a way that might stabilize its orbit temporarily.

See also  Phage Therapy: A Forgotten Cure Battles Antibiotic Resistance!

This theory, as Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University not involved in the studies suggests, places the hypothetical white dwarf in a unique kind of tidal limbo, slowly emitting gravitational waves and spiraling towards the black hole rather than being instantly consumed.

Although still speculative, this scenario could be tested by the upcoming European Space Agency’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a space-based gravitational-wave detector launching in the 2030s. If LISA detects the gravitational waves from a white dwarf in such a state around 1ES 1927+654, it would confirm the theory. If not, it might indicate other complex interactions at play between the black hole and its dynamic surroundings.

Regardless of the outcome, this situation presents a valuable opportunity to study such unique cosmic phenomena now and in the future. “It’s an exciting time where the universe is showing us just how dynamic it can be, offering us new mysteries to solve each week,” Meyer remarked.

Similar Posts

Rate this post
Share this :

Leave a Comment