Celestial discovery: Astronomers watch a supermassive black hole awaken in real time

Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy.

An interdisciplinary team of astronomers and engineers followed up on Zwicky's observation by using information from space- and ground-based telescopes to see how the galaxy's luminosity changed over time. The team classified the galaxy as having an active galactic nucleus, or a bright, compact region that is powered by a supermassive black hole.

And the brightness variations in the galaxy don't resemble anything astronomers have seen before, which only puzzled them further.To find answers, the team consulted archival data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other observatories.

Given that the galaxy is 300 million light-years away, the events that astronomers are seeing happened in the past - but the light from these events is just now reaching Earth after traveling across space for millions of years. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles .

Previous research has pointed to inactive galaxies that appeared to become active after several years, which is usually triggered by black hole activity, but the process of a black hole awakening has never been directly observed before, until now, Hernández García said.

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