A team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Birmingham, University College London and King’s University Belfast has discovered one of the most “dramatic” black hole awakenings ever observed. This was reported by The Royal Astronomical Society.

The black hole, labeled J221951, is about 10 billion light-years from Earth, not 500 million as previously thought. It changes from a dim state to an extremely bright phase in a short time. Information about the flash’s brightness and spontaneity indicates that the supermassive black hole began to absorb the surrounding matter very quickly.

The report states that the object began to glow very suddenly – about 10 months before the first detection – meaning that the black hole began “feeding” very quickly after being “asleep” for a while.

Scientists have put forward two hypotheses to explain this “overfeeding” of a supermassive black hole. First, it may be caused by a tidal collapse, such as when a star collapses as it passes near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Second, it can cause an active galactic nucleus to “transfer from a dormant state to an active state”.

“Our understanding of the different things supermassive black holes can do has been greatly expanded in recent years with the discovery of stellar explosions and accumulating black holes of extremely variable luminosity. Matt Nicholl, J221951, an astronomer at the University of Belfast, is one of the most extreme examples of a black hole that caught us off guard. one,” he said.