Monster black hole spews energy as regularly as Yellowstone's 'Old Faithful'

[Judi Lynn]

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 8 hours ago

Regular energy flares emerge from galaxy ESO 253-3.



A supermassive black hole partially consumes an orbiting giant star. In this illustration, the gas pulled from the star collides with the black hole's debris disk and causes a flare.
(Image: © NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

At the heart of a galaxy more than 570 million light-years away, energy flares into space so consistently that astrophysicists have dubbed the galaxy Old Faithful, like the famously predictable geyser in Yellowstone National Park. This is the first time such regular and frequent flares have been spotted emanating from a distant galaxy's core.

About once every 114 days, flares emerge from the center of galaxy ESO 253-3 (the events actually took place nearly 600 million years ago, but scientists are now seeing them for the first time because of how far light from the galaxy has to travel to reach Earth).

Researchers recently counted 17 of these outbursts spanning about six years. Flares were spotted by instruments on the ground and in space, including NASA space telescopes such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA representatives said in a statement.

The culprit behind the flares is likely the galaxy's supermassive black hole, a cosmic giant roughly 20 times the size of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. To put that into perspective, Sgr A* measures about 14.6 million miles (23.6 million kilometers) in diameter, and is about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

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