A nearby black hole just erupted for the first time in 26 years and scientists are ecstatic

Lurking 8,000 light years from Earth is a black hole 12 times more massive than our sun. It’s been peacefully sleeping for 26 years.

But on June 15, it woke up.

Now, scientists around the world are using highly sophisticated instruments to learn as much as they can about this mysterious beast of nature before the black hole returns to its slumber, which will be soon.

Black holes are very dense, massive objects in space that have an immensely powerful gravitational field that traps anything and everything that comes too close, including light. But on occasion they’ll spit out material as well as suck it in.

On June 15, one of NASA’s satellites picked up a torrent of x-rays all coming from a single source: the black hole.

“Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black hole eruptions are quite rare,” said Neil Gehrels, the principal investigator for Swift, the NASA satellite that first identified the eruption in a NASA press release. “So when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.”

A deadly companion

This black hole is just one half of a two-body system called V404 Cygni. Its partner is a star slightly smaller than our sun, and it’s been nourishing the black hole for at least 77 years. The x-rays that astronomers observed on June 15 were the heated guts from the companion star that had spiraled into the mouth of the black hole.

When black holes in binary systems, like V404 Cygni, feed, they do so by gravitationally attracting a single thread of gas from the star. The black hole is 12 times more massive than its companion and therefore has a much stronger gravitational grip which slowly pulls gas from the star as the star orbits around it, like in the animation below:

As the gas gets pulled in, it orbits around the black hole, forming a disc. The closer the gas gets to the black hole, the stronger gravitational force it feels and so the faster it moves, heating up to searing-hot temperatures. When the gas reaches temperatures of more than 1.7 million degrees Fahrenheit, it emits a jet of high-energy particles, which satellites like NASA’s Swift instrument then detect — albeit 8,000 years later because of the time it takes — For more information read the original article here.