| Title | Black Hole 'Wakes Up' After 26-Year Slumber | |
| Date | Saturday July 04 2015, @10:07PM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the just-a-short-nap dept. | ||
After taking a 26-year nap, a waking black hole released a burst of X-rays that lit up astronomical observatories on June 15 — and it's still making a ruckus today.
Astronomers identified the revived black hole as an "X-ray nova" — a sudden increase in star luminosity — coming from a binary system in the constellation Cygnus. The outburst may have been caused by material falling into a black hole.
The burst was first caught by NASA's Swift satellite, and then by a Japanese experiment on the International Space Station, called Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI). [Black Hole Wakes Up With A Bang (Video)]
"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black-hole eruptions are quite rare," Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "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."
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printed from SoylentNews, Black Hole 'Wakes Up' After 26-Year Slumber on 2026-03-07 08:31:29