A Black Hole’s Puzzling X-Ray Bursts

In 2019, a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 300 million light-years away woke up. Now, it’s puzzling astronomers with an unexpected slowdown in its X-ray bursts.

Ansky Awakens

Nearly seven years ago, the Zwicky Transient Facility saw the galaxy SDSS J133519.91+072807.4 suddenly brighten at optical wavelengths, with the source given the moniker ZTF19acnskyy or “Ansky.” Within the next few years, Ansky brightened at other wavelengths, possibly signaling the first recorded case of a slumbering supermassive black hole grumbling to alertness.

In 2024, Ansky entered a new phase of behavior, exhibiting a series of semi-regular X-ray flares called quasi-periodic eruptions. The leading explanations for these flares, which have been detected from several nearby galaxies, involve a star-sized object spiraling toward a supermassive black hole. The repeating X-ray flares arise when the object crashes through an accretion disk around the black hole, or when the object loses mass each time it passes closest to the black hole. In either scenario, the time between flares is expected to decrease over time — but as new work shows, Ansky is behaving in ways that fail to fit existing theories of quasi-periodic eruptions.

An Unexpected Slowdown

Astronomers first reported on Ansky’s strange behavior in 2025, finding evidence that the time between eruptions was increasing rather than decreasing as expected. To investigate this emerging trend, Joheen Chakraborty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and collaborators analyzed data from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory’s X-ray Telescope, XMM-Newton, and the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).

This X-ray monitoring campaign spanned from January 2025 to January 2026 and captured 23 bursts, including 19 consecutive bursts — the most seen from a quasi-periodic eruption source to date. The bursts each lasted about three days, and the burst luminosity and total energy remained roughly constant, but the time between bursts increased smoothly from 9.9 days in January 2025 to 13.5 days in January 2026.

Possible Explanations

What physical process can produce X-ray bursts that are roughly consistent in energy and peak luminosity, last for approximately three days, and become more spaced out over time? The team considered five possibilities:

1. A star orbiting a black hole could transfer a bit of mass to the black hole each time it draws close… but it’s not clear whether the energy of each burst would remain the same as the star loses mass, nor is it clear how a three-day eruption duration could be achieved.
2. A star partially disrupted by a black hole could be kicked progressively farther from the black hole due to asymmetric mass loss or the reformation of its core… but this scenario cannot explain the bursts’ consistent energies and luminosities.
3. An object orbiting a black hole with an accretion disk could be experiencing general relativistic precession… but no combination of known sources of precession can reproduce Ansky’s behavior.
4. A second supermassive black hole could cause reflex motion of the inner black hole, changing how far the signal must travel… but even though this scenario can increase the time between bursts, the rate of increase is three orders of magnitude too small.
5. Instabilities in the black hole’s accretion disk could trigger recurrent bursts of accretion… but it’s not yet clear how an instability scenario could produce such predictable behavior.

While none of these models can fully solve the mystery of Ansky’s slackening X-ray flares, this work provides new avenues for exploration. In the meantime, we may get new clues simply from waiting to see what this source does next!

Citation

“A Positive Period Derivative in the Quasiperiodic Eruptions of ZTF19acnskyy,” Joheen Chakraborty et al 2026 ApJL 1001 L6. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae548b

This post originally appeared on AAS Nova, which features research highlights from the journals of the American Astronomical Society.