Astronomers witness supermassive black hole gorge on a cosmic meal before 'burping' radio jets 300 days later

Automatically curated summary from Space.com.

According to research accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers using NASA’s Swift Observatory and radio observations analyzed a supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy NGC 1275 in the Perseus Cluster. Team leader Sarah Ketchum reported a major X-ray flare in February 2023 caused by a spike in matter accretion rather than a star-destroying tidal disruption event. The team found tentative evidence of a 300-day delay between the X-ray flare and subsequent radio jet emissions, offering insight into black hole disk-jet coupling.

Context and limitations

The team emphasized that evidence for the 300-day delay is tentative due to sparsely sampled X-ray data, requiring further testing and observations from instruments like XMM-Newton and XRISM to establish a definitive connection.