This Supermassive Black Hole May Harbor a Bizarre Undead Star
Astronomers are grappling with a complex cosmic mystery lurking at the dark heart of a distant galaxy some 270 million light-years from Earth. And its resolution could revolutionize our understanding of how black holes feast on matter throughout the universe.
Known as 1ES 1927+654 and located in the constellation Draco, this far-off island of stars harbors at its core a supermassive black hole weighing more than a million suns—which, surprisingly, isn’t very remarkable.
Most large galaxies, including our own, host such hefty monstrosities at their center.
But this black hole has proved extraordinarily strange: the object shocked observers with an abrupt outburst of radiation so intense that it apparently obliterated the black hole’s corona, an enveloping cloud of whirling, billion-degree plasma, for three months in 2018.
The most obvious explanation for these x-ray oscillations, the researchers say, is that they’re a clear but indirect signal of a substantial something orbiting very close to the black hole. It’s so close, in fact, that it must be plowing through the black hole’s accretion disk—a maelstrom of infalling matter made incandescent from frictional heating as it piles up around the gravitational monster’s maw.