In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy named SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation.
Ashley StricklandIn 2019, astronomers noticed a sudden spike in brightness in a galaxy 300 million light years away.
With its extreme wide-field view, the camera scans the entire northern sky every two days, capturing data on celestial objects such as near-Earth asteroids as well as distant, bright supernovas. "Imagine you've been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive," said lead study author Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, in a statement. "Suddenly, its starts showing dramatic changes in brightness, unlike any typical events we've seen before."
But such events only last dozens or hundreds of days - and SDSS1335+0728 continues to grow in brightness more than four years after researchers first observed it spiking in luminosity like the flick of a cosmic light switch. Together, the datasets presented a broad portrait of the galaxy both before and after the December 2019 observation, revealing that the galaxy shifted to emit much more ultraviolet, visible and infrared light in recent years, and X-rays beginning in February - which is unprecedented behavior, Sánchez Sáez said.
"These giant monsters usually are sleeping and not directly visible," said study coauthor Claudio Ricci, associate professor at Diego Portales University in Chile, in a statement. "In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright."
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