22/07/2026 19:41 - Otros
According to reports from Infobae published on July 22, 2026, a black hole erupted once again, and for the first time in history, astronomers were able to follow the episode in real time. This milestone marks the third outburst detected in 35 years at the center of the galaxy IC 3599, located an incredible 280 million light-years away from our planet.
Context for our international readers: A light-year is the distance that light travels in one Earth year, roughly 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers). This means the light we are seeing now began its journey 280 million years ago!
The international team, led by D. Grupe from Northern Kentucky University, published their analysis on the arXiv preprint platform. A monthly monitoring program, which reportedly began in 2013, would have been key to detecting the new increase in brightness in October 2025 and triggering detailed observations.
The collected data suggests that galaxy IC 3599 reached a brightness approximately 50 times higher than its usual low-luminosity phase. To examine this magnificent episode, researchers reportedly used both space and ground-based telescopes, including Swift and XMM-Newton, as well as the Lick, Xinglong, and the Caucasus Mountain Observatory (CMO).
Based on the mass relationship of the host galaxy, the team estimated that the supermassive black hole possesses about 2 million solar masses.
What is a solar mass? It is a unit of mass equal to the mass of our own Sun (roughly 333,000 times the mass of Earth). A black hole with 2 million solar masses is an incredibly massive and powerful object!
Black Hole: It is an extreme concentration of matter in a reduced volume. Its gravity is so intense that it possesses a boundary, called the event horizon, from which not even light can escape.
Accretion Disk: This is the inner region where gas and matter orbit the black hole. The gravitational force attracts this matter, heating it to millions of degrees and causing it to emit light in the X-ray spectrum.
The explanation that scientists consider most probable suggests the origin could be found in a radiation pressure instability within the accretion disk. In that region, light would exert such intense pressure on the gas that the system becomes unstable, triggering a sudden fall of matter inward.
According to this interpretation, the gas would accumulate until reaching a limit, produce the eruption, and subsequently, the disk would empty, cool down, and refill again. This cycle could repeat itself without following an exact rhythm.
The intervals between previous episodes (recorded in 1990 and 2010) and the current one would be about 19.5 years and then 15.7 years. For researchers, this discrepancy makes a strictly periodic mechanism much less likely.
The study does not completely rule out other possibilities, such as the repeated stripping of a star by the black hole or the existence of two black holes orbiting each other, although such hypotheses would not explain some properties of the observed outbursts. The case of IC 3599 provides vital clues about how matter flows toward a black hole when the system brushes against its physical limits, opening a hopeful window into understanding the most extreme phenomena in the universe.
Alfredo S. Quiroga
