Monster black hole spews energy as regularly as Yellowstone's 'Old Faithful' - Livescience.com

Regular energy flares emerge from galaxy ESO 253-3.

At the heart of a galaxy more than 570 million light-years away, energy flares into space so consistently that astrophysicists have dubbed the galaxy Old Faithful, like the famously predictable geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

About once every 114 days, flares emerge from the center of galaxy ESO 253-3 (the events actually took place nearly 600 million years ago, but scientists are now seeing them for the first time because of how far light from the galaxy has to travel to reach Earth). .

Flares were spotted by instruments on the ground and in space, including NASA space telescopes such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA representatives said in a statement.

The culprit behind the flares is likely the galaxy's supermassive black hole, a cosmic giant roughly 20 times the size of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

As ESO 253-3's enormous black hole snacks on a nearby star, gases siphoned from the star collide with the black hole's debris disk to produce brilliant flares, according to research presented on Jan.

The likeliest explanation for the recurring flares is a phenomenon known as a tidal disruption, in which the orbit of a star carries it so close to a black hole that pieces of the star are ripped away and sucked into the accretion disk — a diffuse band of dust, gas and debris rotating around the black hole.

In the case of ESO 253-3, a massive star's orbit may bring it close enough to the black hole for the star to lose some of its matter, generating a flare.

The cycle repeats every time the star travels close enough to the black hole to feel its inexorable pull, the researchers explained in the study.

ESO 253-3's regular and predictable emissions provided a rare window into black hole behavior and could help scientists to better understand how these mysterious cosmic objects grow and change, according to the study