In December of 2019, the sky-scanning Zwicky Transient Facility — a telescope perched on California's Palomar Mountain — alerted astronomers to a sudden flare coming from an otherwise unremarkable galaxy some 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The flare's intensity dipped and peaked dramatically over four years, but it continues to persist even today. That's unusually long for such a flare — so long, in fact, that it can't be explained by any typical cosmic phenomena.
"This behavior is unprecedented," Paula Sánchez-Sáez, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, who led the discovery, said in a statement.
The researchers suspect we're witnessing a giant black hole lurking in the galaxy's heart as it wakes up from a deep slumber by feasting on surrounding gas. This gaseous material reaches scorching temperatures just before it falls into the cosmic abyss, creating light shows detectable by the Zwicky telescope. If that's really the case, this would be the first time we've spotted a black hole "switch on," Sánchez-Sáez and her colleagues announced on Tuesday (June 18).
Source: www.space.com
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