Jaw-dropping moment astronomers catch supermassive black hole 'waking up' on camera

The jaw-dropping moment the astronomers caught a supermassive black hole ‘waking up’ was captured on camera.

The incredible phenomenon was found using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the Very Large Array (VLA).

The discovery showed a supermassive black hole appearing to wake up from a deep slumber, giving astronomers new insight into the early stages of activity for a black hole.

A study conducted in the black hole was led by Francesco Ubertosi from the University of Bologna and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, who said: “This is like watching a sleeping giant wake up. We’re seeing this supermassive black hole at the very beginning of its active phase, before it has had time to significantly alter its surroundings. It’s an incredibly rare opportunity to study the ‘before’ picture of black hole feedback.”

(X/@fubertosi)

The VLBA is so powerful that it can pick out details from so far away that it has been compared to reading a newspaper in Los Angeles all the way from New York.

Using the technology, the team of researchers found that the black hole’s jets only extend out to around 30 parsecs, which is approximately 100 light years.

While it sounds enormous, these jets are very small compared to other black holes and indicate that it is still in its infancy.

Co-author Myriam Gitti, who is also from the University of Bologna, explained: “The jets are so young and small that they haven’t had time to push away the surrounding hot gas or disrupt the cooling process that’s happening in the cluster core. This gives us a unique laboratory to study how black hole feedback begins.”

The discovery showed a supermassive black hole appearing to wake up (Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

In a previous study, it was found that hot gas inside the cluster core of the black hole tends to have low entropy, which is the measure of disorder or randomness in a system, and also has short cooling times.

Speaking about this, co-author Pasquale Temi, who is from the NASA Ames Research Center, explained: “We think what we’re seeing is the smoking gun of how supermassive black holes get triggered in the first place. The gas in this cluster core is cooling very efficiently, potentially providing the fuel that awakened this sleeping black hole.”

Ubertosi added: “In this case, it’s not just the black hole being dormant for a long time that triggers cooling - the cluster also shows signs of a recent merger, which may have enhanced the cooling and helped wake up the black hole.”