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Our galaxy's supermassive black hole is the closest one to Earth so we can see in great detail both the stars and the gas near the black hole."
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"Supermassive black holes are not easy to study because most of them are so far away. "We have a great opportunity right now to learn about how supermassive black holes are fed and how they might grow," Do said. The team say that more research is needed to determine what exactly is happening at Sagittarius A*-which is located around 26,000 light-years from Earth. Another possibility is large asteroids being dragged into the black hole. These include gas being sucked into the black hole from the star S0-2 or the binary star G2 as they made close approaches to Sagittarius A*. The scientists have proposed several possible explanations for the increases in brightness. "The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase-for example if the spigot has been turned up and the rate of gas falling down the black hole 'drain' has increased for an extended period-or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in," UCLA's Mark Morris, another co-senior author, said in a statement. On May 13, 2019, the brightness of Sagittarius A* changed by a factor of 75 in about two hours."Īt present, it is not clear whether the latest observations indicate a one-off event or the beginning of a period of increased activity for the black hole. "We think that something unusual might be happening this year because the black hole seems to vary in brightness more, reaching brighter levels than we've ever seen in the past. "The brightness of Sagittarius A* varies all the time, getting brighter and fainter on the timescale of minutes to hours-it basically flickers like a candle," lead author of the study Tuan Do, also from UCLA, told Newsweek. While the brightness of Sagittarius A* always varies to a certain degree, the unusual observations-recorded in April and May this year-were extreme in nature, particularly the measurement made on May 13. We don't know what is driving this big feast." "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. "We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," Andrea Ghez, co-senior author of the study from UCLA, said in a statement. Scientists say the increases in brightness around the black hole are caused by radiation as it sucks in an unusually large quantity of gas and dust Keck Observatory in Hawaii, revealed at least three "unprecedented" spikes in brightness earlier this year at regions just outside the black hole's event horizon-the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. These observations, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the W. In a study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA,) examined more than 13,000 observations of the supermassive black hole-known as Sagittarius A*-dating back to 2003. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy seems to be getting hungrier and scientists aren't sure why.