Mysterious force destroys monster black hole's ring of plasma

By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer 16 hours ago

Telescopes saw a giant black hole's corona light up and then wink out.



omething caused a giant black hole's bright corona to wink out. Researchers suspect it may have been a collision with a star, illustrated here.
(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Telescopes all over the world watched a bright flash appear around a distant, supermassive black hole. And then, very quickly, it was gone.

The black hole — the heavy core of a galaxy named 1ES 1927+654 — was visible from Earth due to its corona, the ring of superheated particles whirling around its event horizon, or point of no return for infalling matter. There was nothing special about this state of affairs; all across space, astronomers can spot supermassive black holes thanks to their luminous coronas. And this corona was nestled inside a seemingly ordinary active galactic nucleus (AGN), or a larger region of dust, gas and star clusters.

But in March 2018, this black hole's corona briefly shined extra bright. The All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASSASN), a group of 24 Ohio State University telescopes around the world designed to hunt supernovas , picked up a 40-fold increase in brightness.

"This was an AGN that we sort of knew about, but it wasn't very special," Erin Kara, an MIT physicist and lead author of a paper on the event, said in a statement. "Then they noticed that this run-of-the-mill AGN became suddenly bright, which got our attention, and we started pointing lots of other telescopes in lots of other wavelengths to look at it."

More:
https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-corona-killer.html