This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: By combining roughly two decades of observations from NASA's Swift X-ray Telescope with radio monitoring, astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Perseus Cluster suddenly flaring in X-rays, and about 300 days later, its powerful radio emission flared too. Their paper describing the connection between this black hole's accretion disk and the jets it launches was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 13 and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The supermassive black hole in question sits inside NGC 1275. At the center of the Perseus Cluster, NGC 1275 is its brightest member. It's a chaotic and complicated galaxy, showing signs of an ongoing merger and glowing filaments of gas trailing behind bubbles blown outward by the galaxy's central black hole.
It is considered an ideal natural laboratory for studying how a black hole's feeding behavior connects to and drives its jet—a relationship astronomers call disk-jet coupling. This behavior is also critical to understanding how black holes limit galaxy growth. Observations, however, limit the study of this connection.
The powerful Chandra X-ray telescope is unable to observe this galaxy frequently enough to track rapid changes over time. Additionally, the black hole's mass remains debated, with estimates spanning nearly two orders of magnitude. To address this, astronomers turned to Swift, a less powerful but far more frequently available telescope, compiling nearly 20 years of X-ray monitoring data.
Sarah Ketchum of the University of Michigan and her team aimed to map the galaxy's long-term X-ray variability to offer clues about the disk-jet coupling. Researchers found the strongest X-ray flare ever recorded from this galaxy, starting around February 2023. Its X-ray brightness jumped by a factor of about 2.
This flaring episode lasted less than 60 days and appeared to consist of at least two distinct bursts, each lasting only about 5 days. They tested possible explanations and compared the X-ray behavior with existing radio observations to search for timing relationships between the two. The team first tested a tantalizing idea: Could this be a tidal disruption event, where a star wanders too close and gets torn apart?
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