Mysterious black hole starts flashing – and scientists don’t know why
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A mysterious black hole has started behaving even more strangely, scientists have said. The supermassive black hole has been sending out flashes that have increased in speed. Astronomers say they have never seen anything like it before. The black hole is known as 1ES 1927+654, has the mass of a million of suns and is in a galaxy roughly 100 million miles away.
It was already fascinating to scientists. In 2018, they watched as the swirling hot plasma that makes up its corona suddenly disappeared, before coming back a few months later – which itself was unprecedented. Scientists had been watching it since “because it was so beautiful”, co-author Erin Kara, associate professor of physics at MIT. “Then we noticed something that has never really been seen before.”.
Researchers say that for the last two years X-ray flashes have been coming out of the supermassive black hole with an increasing frequency, going from once every 18 minutes to every seven minutes. That, too, has never been seen before. “We’ve never seen this dramatic variability in the rate at which it’s flashing,” said Megan Masterson, a graduate student in physics at MIT who helped lead the discovery. “This looked absolutely nothing like a normal black hole.”.
Astronomers are not sure why that might be happening. The most likely explanation is that there is a spinning white dwarf slowly moving towards the edge of the black hole – but that would mean that it is hovering on the edge of it, getting close without falling in.
