The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy emitted a bizarre flash of light, an astronomer studying the phenomenon said.
“I was pretty surprised at first and then very excited,” Tuan Do, assistant researcher at the UCLA Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics, told Science Alert.
“The black hole was so bright I at first mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sgr A* that bright. Over the next few frames, though, it was clear the source was variable and had to be the black hole. I knew almost right away there was probably something interesting going on with the black hole,” he continued.
Do and his team captured the anomaly at WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii. He tweeted a condensed time-lapse of the flash.
“One of the possibilities is that the star S0-2, when it passed close to the black hole last year, changed the way gas flows into the black hole, and so more gas is falling on it, leading it to become more variable,” he added.
Scientists are continuing to gather more data on the event so a solid explanation can be reached.
