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A black hole woke up years after devouring a star
n 2018, a supermassive black hole destroyed a star that ventured too close — a normal tidal disruption event, the kind astronomers have now observed over a hundred times. They recorded it, studied it, and moved on. But years later, something unexpected happened: that same black hole, nicknamed “Jetty McJetface” by scientists (AT2018hyz), started emitting a radio jet 50 times more powerful than before. No one expected a black hole to “reactivate” like that, long after devouring its victim. The most likely explanation: not all of the star’s material fell into the black hole right away. Part of that stellar debris stayed in orbit and only began falling in and…
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There’s a star that has survived the same black hole twice
In 2022, astronomers detected a flash of light coming from a distant galaxy: a star had been partially devoured by a supermassive black hole. Nothing out of the ordinary… until two years later, in 2024, the same flare appeared again, almost identical, in the same location. The conclusion: it wasn’t a different star, and it wasn’t a coincidence. It was the same star, returning to the black hole on an elliptical orbit, losing another piece of itself with each close pass. Scientists nicknamed the case “the unluckiest star in the universe” (AT 2022dbl). What makes this discovery so important is that it changes what we thought we knew about these…
