The giant black hole “works”, becoming one of the brightest objects ever seen

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Scientists searching the universe for signs of a rare outburst may have stumbled upon something even more impressive: a supermassive black hole “shooting” in the early universe, going from dim to phenomenally bright in the blink of a cosmic eye.

The black hole, named J221951, is estimated to be about 10 billion light-years from Earth, which means the cosmic monster turned on its lights when the universe was about a quarter of its current age. Despite this vast distance, the black hole shone so intensely that astronomers thought it was a starburst less than a billion light-years away.

Related: Could the Earth be inside a black hole?

The fact that the black hole appeared so bright from afar makes it one of the brightest transits — things that suddenly light up and then fade — ever detected, according to the authors of a study accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available as a preliminary print on arXiv.

“Our understanding of the different things supermassive black holes can do has expanded exponentially in recent years,” study co-author Matt Nicholl, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast, said in a statement. “J221951 is one of the most extreme examples yet of a black hole that has surprised us.”

The first surprise came when the researchers tracked the trajectory of a gravitational wave, a fast-moving ripple in space-time created by the most massive cosmic collisions. The team hypothesized that the wave was set off during the collision of two dense, dead stars known as neutron stars, which are known to be erupted in bright explosions called kilonova explosions.

The ripple in space-time did indeed result in a bright object. But unlike a kilonova, which first appears blue before turning red over several days, this patch of sky has remained bright and blue for months — far longer than a starburst should.

Follow-up observations using multiple telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, revealed that the mysterious object lines up with the center of a dim, distant galaxy, indicating that it could be a supermassive black hole, much like a black hole. In the center of the Milky Way. After 10 months of brightness, the object finally begins to fade again, proving that it is not a galaxy itself, but a transiting object undergoing an intense high-energy attack.

If J221951 is indeed a supermassive black hole, its sudden burst of brightness has two possible explanations, according to the researchers. First, the black hole could have pulled an orbiting star around it into its clutches, stretching the star and tearing it to pieces in a chaotic process called a tidal disruption or “spaghettieff” event. A second, more mysterious possibility, is that the black hole could switch its states from rest to active feeding, as it suddenly began gobbling up the fast-moving disk of gas that surrounds it.

Knowing precisely why a black hole is “running” will require further studies of the object’s energy output. The team concluded that if the black hole suddenly brightens again, that means it may be feeding. But if it fades away for good, it’s likely that some unfortunate star has been devoured in the most spectacular way imaginable. May we all burn gloriously.

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