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By NASA
International teams of astronomers monitoring a supermassive black hole in the heart of a distant galaxy have detected features never seen before using data from NASA missions and other facilities. The features include the launch of a plasma jet moving at nearly one-third the speed of light and unusual, rapid X-ray fluctuations likely arising from near the very edge of the black hole.
Radio images of 1ES 1927+654 reveal emerging structures that appear to be jets of plasma erupting from both sides of the galaxy’s central black hole following a strong radio flare. The first image, taken in June 2023, shows no sign of the jet, possibly because hot gas screened it from view. Then, starting in February 2024, the features emerge and expand away from the galaxy’s center, covering a total distance of about half a light-year as measured from the center of each structure. NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/Meyer at al. 2025 The source is 1ES 1927+654, a galaxy located about 270 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. It harbors a central black hole with a mass equivalent to about 1.4 million Suns.
“In 2018, the black hole began changing its properties right before our eyes, with a major optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray outburst,” said Eileen Meyer, an associate professor at UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County). “Many teams have been keeping a close eye on it ever since.”
She presented her team’s findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland. A paper led by Meyer describing the radio results was published Jan. 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
After the outburst, the black hole appeared to return to a quiet state, with a lull in activity for nearly a year. But by April 2023, a team led by Sibasish Laha at UMBC and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, had noted a steady, months-long increase in low-energy X-rays in measurements by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) telescope on the International Space Station. This monitoring program, which also includes observations from NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) and ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton mission, continues.
The increase in X-rays triggered the UMBC team to make new radio observations, which indicated a strong and highly unusual radio flare was underway. The scientists then began intensive observations using the NRAO’s (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array) and other facilities. The VLBA, a network of radio telescopes spread across the U.S., combines signals from individual dishes to create what amounts to a powerful, high-resolution radio camera. This allows the VLBA to detect features less than a light-year across at 1ES 1927+654’s distance.
Active galaxy 1ES 1927+654, circled, has exhibited extraordinary changes since 2018, when a major outburst occurred in visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light. The galaxy harbors a central black hole weighing about 1.4 million solar masses and is located 270 million light-years away. Pan-STARRS Radio data from February, April, and May 2024 reveals what appear to be jets of ionized gas, or plasma, extending from either side of the black hole, with a total size of about half a light-year. Astronomers have long puzzled over why only a fraction of monster black holes produce powerful plasma jets, and these observations may provide critical clues.
“The launch of a black hole jet has never been observed before in real time,” Meyer noted. “We think the outflow began earlier, when the X-rays increased prior to the radio flare, and the jet was screened from our view by hot gas until it broke out early last year.”
A paper exploring that possibility, led by Laha, is under review at The Astrophysical Journal. Both Meyer and Megan Masterson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who also presented at the meeting, are co-authors.
Using XMM-Newton observations, Masterson found that the black hole exhibited extremely rapid X-ray variations between July 2022 and March 2024. During this period, the X-ray brightness repeatedly rose and fell by 10% every few minutes. Such changes, called millihertz quasiperiodic oscillations, are difficult to detect around supermassive black holes and have been observed in only a handful of systems to date.
“One way to produce these oscillations is with an object orbiting within the black hole’s accretion disk. In this scenario, each rise and fall of the X-rays represents one orbital cycle,” Masterson said.
If the fluctuations were caused by an orbiting mass, then the period would shorten as the object fell ever closer to the black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return. Orbiting masses generate ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. These waves drain away orbital energy, bringing the object closer to the black hole, increasing its speed, and shortening its orbital period.
Over two years, the fluctuation period dropped from 18 minutes to just 7 — the first-ever measurement of its kind around a supermassive black hole. If this represented an orbiting object, it was now moving at half the speed of light. Then something unexpected happened — the fluctuation period stabilized.
In this artist’s concept, matter is stripped from a white dwarf (sphere at lower right) orbiting within the innermost accretion disk surrounding 1ES 1927+654’s supermassive black hole. Astronomers developed this scenario to explain the evolution of rapid X-ray oscillations detected by ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton satellite. ESA’s LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission, due to launch in the next decade, should be able to confirm the presence of an orbiting white dwarf by detecting the gravitational waves it produces. NASA/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University “We were shocked by this at first,” Masterson explained. “But we realized that as the object moved closer to the black hole, its strong gravitational pull could begin to strip matter from the companion. This mass loss could offset the energy removed by gravitational waves, halting the companion’s inward motion.”
So what could this companion be? A small black hole would plunge straight in, and a normal star would quickly be torn apart by the tidal forces near the monster black hole. But the team found that a low-mass white dwarf — a stellar remnant about as large as Earth — could remain intact close to the black hole’s event horizon while shedding some of its matter. A paper led by Masterson summarizing these results will appear in the Feb. 13 edition of the journal Nature.
This model makes a key prediction, Masterson notes. If the black hole does have a white dwarf companion, the gravitational waves it produces will be detectable by LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), an ESA mission in partnership with NASA that is expected to launch in the next decade.
Download high-resolution images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contacts:
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Last Updated Jan 13, 2025 Related Terms
Active Galaxies Astrophysics Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Jet Propulsion Laboratory Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) Radio Astronomy Supermassive Black Holes The Universe White Dwarfs X-ray Astronomy XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror Newton) View the full article
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By NASA
FjordPhyto participants playing in an incredible phytoplankton bloom surrounded by early season sea ice at Damoy on the Antarctic Peninsula. They share knowledge with one another and take samples to better understand and protect Antarctica. Allison Cusick This year, we’re giving thanks to you for Doing NASA Science! You and the millions of other volunteers have enabled an incredible banquet of discoveries—by taking data, analyzing data, writing code, writing papers, and even inventing your own science projects. Your work helps us maintain our leadership in space science!
Our scientists have shared examples of many outstanding volunteers. Here are just a few of the remarkable amateur scientists/citizen scientists whose help we’re so grateful for:
Dani Abras from the FjordPhyto project.
“Dani Abras has been an exemplary facilitator of the FjordPhyto program with travelers in Antarctica. Her enthusiasm for engaging people in the natural world is infectious and her love of participatory science draws people into the wonderful microscopic world of phytoplankton. She is a very enthusiastic and engaged Expedition Guide and you might even see her featured in our new online training course on the NASA Infiniscope platform.” –Allison Cusick
Mr. Kevvy from the “Are we Alone in the Universe?” project.
“Mr. Kevvy goes above and beyond as a moderator of `Are we alone in the universe?’. He is always reaching out to me and letting me know what our volunteers have been experiencing, as well as going out of his way to look for other collaborations our project might be interested in. His insight is always extremely helpful, and many of his ideas have made it into our final products. I enjoy working with him and am grateful for his support.” –Megan Li
Nicholas Brereton, Emmanuel Gonzalez, and Stefan Green from the Genelab Microbes Analysis Working Group.
“Over the course of ~6 years, the open-access data in NASA GeneLab/Open Science Data Repository was mined by this 100% volunteer group in the Microbes Analysis Working Group, which resulted in this recent publication: Spaceflight alters host-gut microbiota interactions All authors in the publication could/should get kudos, but especially the ones listed above who saw it through” –Ryan Scott
Want to join this illustrious group and make a lasting mark on NASA science? You’ll find opportunities here at https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/. Happy Thanksgiving!
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Last Updated Nov 26, 2024 Related Terms
Astrophysics Biological & Physical Sciences Citizen Science Earth Science Heliophysics Planetary Science Explore More
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By NASA
This illustration shows a red, early-universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The black hole is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate so soon after the birth of the universe, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early universe.
The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey, a catalog resulting from some 4.6 million Chandra observations. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous near-infrared observations. By following up with Webb, astronomers could use the observatory’s unique infrared sensitivity to detect these faint counterpart emissions, which led to the discovery of the black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.
LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole “seeds,” which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
The new discovery suggests that “a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who led the research team.
A paper describing these results (“A super-Eddington-accreting black hole ~1.5 Gyr after the Big Bang observed with JWST”) appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.
About the Missions
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
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Elizabeth Laundau
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By NASA
Artists Concept of the WASP-77 A b system. A planet swings in front of its star, dimming the starlight we see. Events like these, called transits, provide us with bounties of information about exoplanets–planets around stars other than the Sun. But predicting when these special events occur can be challenging…unless you have help from volunteers.
Luckily, a collaboration of multiple teams of amateur planet-chasers, led by researcher Federico R. Noguer from Arizona State University and researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), has taken up the challenge. This collaboration has published the most precise physical and orbital parameters to date for an important exoplanet called WASP-77 A b. These precise parameters help us predict future transit events and are crucial for planning spacecraft observations and accurate atmospheric modeling.
“As a retired dentist and now citizen scientist for Exoplanet Watch, research opportunities like this give me a way to learn and contribute to this amazingly exciting field of astrophysics,” said Anthony Norris, a citizen scientist working on the NASA-funded Exoplanet Watch project.
The study combined amateur astronomy/citizen science data from the Exoplanet Watch and ExoClock projects, as well as the Exoplanet Transit Database. It also incorporated data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and La Silla Observatory. Exoplanet Watch invites volunteers to participate in groundbreaking exoplanet research, using their own telescopes to observe exoplanets or by analyzing data others have gathered. You may have read another recent article about how the Exoplanet Watch team helped validate a new exoplanet candidate.
WASP-77 A b is a gas giant exoplanet that orbits a Sun-like star. It’s only about 20% larger than Jupiter. But that’s where the similarities to our solar system end. This blazing hot gas ball orbits right next to its star–more than 200 times closer to its star than our Jupiter!
Want a piece of the action? Join the Exoplanet Watch project and help contribute to cutting-edge exoplanet science! Anyone can participate–participation does not require citizenship in any particular country.
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Last Updated Sep 19, 2024 Related Terms
Astrophysics Citizen Science Exoplanet Science Explore More
4 min read NASA’s Webb Provides Another Look Into Galactic Collisions
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By European Space Agency
Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, scientists observed the region above Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot to discover a variety of previously unseen features. The region, previously believed to be unremarkable in nature, hosts a variety of intricate structures and activity.
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