{"id":238240,"date":"2026-06-03T02:31:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/dormant-black-hole-revives-in-under-three-years-brightening-10-fold-in-nearby-galaxy"},"modified":"2026-06-03T02:31:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:31:38","slug":"dormant-black-hole-revives-in-under-three-years-brightening-10-fold-in-nearby-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/dormant-black-hole-revives-in-under-three-years-brightening-10-fold-in-nearby-galaxy","title":{"rendered":"Dormant black hole revives in under three years, brightening 10-fold in nearby galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dormant-black-hole-revives-in-under-three-years-brightening-10-fold-in-nearby-galaxy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers monitoring a nearby active galaxy for six years have watched its supermassive black hole dramatically wake up, brightening by a factor of 10 across ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. The paper outlining the study was posted to the preprint server <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.18958v1\" target=\"_blank\"><i>arXiv<\/i><\/a> on May 18.<\/p>\n<p>In active galactic nuclei (AGN), material spiraling into the central black hole releases enormous amounts of energy. The accretion disk\u2014a swirling ring of hot gas\u2014radiates this energy primarily in optical and ultraviolet (UV) light. Additionally, a separate region of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-08-supercomputer-simulations-explanation-ray-black.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">extremely hot plasma<\/a> sits above the disk. It is called the corona, which is responsible for the X-ray emission.<\/p>\n<p>Understanding how these two components relate to each other and how they evolve as a black hole\u2019s feeding rate changes remains an open problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers monitoring a nearby active galaxy for six years have watched its supermassive black hole dramatically wake up, brightening by a factor of 10 across ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. The paper outlining the study was posted to the preprint server arXiv on May 18. In active galactic nuclei (AGN), material spiraling into the central black [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}