Spacecraft from NASA discovers monster black hole bursting with X-rays, releasing more energy than ever before

Every now and then, we all wake up feeling off-but a newly discovered supermassive black hole seems to be having an especially dramatic awakening. Situated at the center of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, around 300 million light-years from Earth, this once-dormant cosmic giant has begun unleashing extraordinarily powerful X-ray flares-the most intense and longest-lasting ever captured from a similar black hole.

With this unexpected shift, the black hole enters an active phase where it is consuming nearby matter and ejecting energy bursts called quasiperiodic eruptions, or QPEs. These short-lived yet repetitive outbursts signal that the supermassive black hole, previously quiet for decades, has become the engine behind what astronomers call an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. For this specific AGN, the study team has given it the appellation “Ansky.”

When Ansky’s abrupt reawakening was initially discovered in late 2019, researchers used NASA’s Swift X-ray satellite telescope to track its activity. By early 2024, the flares had become more consistent, providing scientists a rare chance to watch a black hole’s feeding frenzy unfold in real time. Joheen Chakraborty of MIT, part of the research team, explained that the X-ray flares from Ansky are not just powerful-they’re extreme, even by black hole standards. The eruptions are ten times longer and brighter than those typically observed in QPEs, emitting roughly 100 times more energy. These bursts occur on a 4.5-day cycle, the longest regular interval seen so far for such phenomena.

Such behavior is stretching existing models of QPEs to their limits. Though previous QPEs have been linked to black holes capturing and destroying stars, that scenario doesn’t seem to apply to Ansky. Scientists are still unsure what exactly is fueling the eruptions. As ESA X-ray astronomer Erwan Quintin noted, the data from Ansky challenges assumptions that QPEs stem from smaller celestial objects being consumed by supermassive ones. This event, he said, may indicate a different process altogether.

The international team was able to capture these rare observations with the help of ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, NASA’s NICER and Chandra missions, and past data from eROSITA. These findings could also have implications beyond X-rays. Quintin suggested that Ansky’s rhythmic bursts might be associated with gravitational waves, something the upcoming ESA/NASA mission LISA-scheduled to launch in 2037-could detect. The combination of X-ray and gravitational wave data may ultimately shed light on the elusive and powerful nature of supermassive black holes like Ansky.