Black hole wakes up
How? Why?
Here’s what I’m talking about:
Suddenly, in late 2019, the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 started shining brighter than ever before. To understand why, astronomers used data from several space and ground-based observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track how the galaxy’s brightness has varied.
In a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics today (June 18), they conclude that they are witnessing changes never seen before in a galaxy — likely the result of the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at its core.
Did it hear some sort of cosmic alarm clock? Get a jolt of caffeine?
Some phenomena, like supernova explosions or tidal disruption events — when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart — can make galaxies suddenly light up. But these brightness variations typically last only a few dozen or, at most, a few hundred days. SDSS1335+0728 is still growing brighter today, more than four years after it was first seen to ‘switch on’. Moreover, the variations detected in the galaxy, which is located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, are unlike any seen before, pointing astronomers towards a different explanation. …
Massive black holes — with masses over one hundred thousand times that of our Sun — exist at the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way. “These giant monsters usually are sleeping and not directly visible,” explains co-author Claudio Ricci, from the Diego Portales University, also in Chile. “In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, [which] suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright.”
“[This] process (…) has never been observed before,” Hernández García says.
As Hamlet said, ““There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
miguel and I were talking about this, the black hole itself didn’t do anything different, but the matter falling into it did, which is why the area around the black hole is brighter. They’re just describing it in a dramatic and misleading way.
What Niketas said. Not anything to get excited about. Just an increase in material within the black hole accretion disk. Yawn.
Re: …likely the result of the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at its core.
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Father, The Sleeper Has Awakened!
–“Dune” (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67ragXpWsAI
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Yes, it was over the top. Yes, David Lynch took the Alan Smithee director’s credit to renounce all claims to the 1984 “Dune.”
But I still have a soft spot for his version.
I know that black holes are thought to power most normal galaxies and they’re gravitational rotation, the cascade of stars in its ambit. (Thank you, Edwin Hubble.)
I also doubt that such minor matters as this brightening would be large enough for LIGO to measure gravity waves. But, designed to measure the most dramatic events in the universe, it’s planned to increase its sensitivity, too. Future, perhaps?
}}} “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Actually, this idea has been around since the 1960s — Larry Niven has it as a critical event in his Known Space “future history” timeline (a concept coined by the late Robert Heinlein for his own future timeline of events in which a major, and well-known set of his short stories and novels took place).
The full timeline, along with the stories set in it, can be found here:
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Complete_Known_Space_Timeline
The most central story, in which it is identified, is the rather obviously titled,
At the Core, collected in the short story collection, Neutron Star “taking place in [2646 C.E.]”
Wikipedia summarizes the story here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Core
The discovery that the core of the Milky Way is exploding, and that, in 20,000 years (clearly, it moves at the speed of light, no faster), a wave of radiation will pass through this area which will sterilize it of all known life forms, triggers a succession of events that ripple throughout his subsequent stories and comes into play in a wide and interesting variety of ways.
There is no immediate long-term effect on human planning, of course… because humans tend to procrastinate and leave the issues for others later on to worry about… Kind of like the way the US Government has been running up the credit card for decades, now… each successive Congress knowing they’ll be dead and gone before the butcher’s bill comes due…
20,000 years? That’s for people 100, 300, 600 generations from now to worry about…
https://www.earth.com/news/james-webb-detects-signs-of-life-on-exoplanet-k2-18b/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
ObloodyHell, I also immediately thought of Larry Niven. And if he was right about this, what ELSE was he right about ?
And this event actually took place 300 million years ago. Its light just reached us. Finally.