Massive Black Hole Has Gone Dormant In Unusual Finding: NASA Update 2013

Almost a decade ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory caught signs of what appeared to be a black hole. The NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) found the black hole. The NuSTAR, which sees higher-energy X-rays, found that the black hole was quickly consuming gas in the middle of the nearby Sculptor galaxy.

Howeer, a decade later, the black hole has gone dormant.

In a study, scientists from NASA found that, "Periodic observations with both Chandra and NuSTAR should tell us unambiguously if the black hole wakes up again. If this happens in the next few years, we hope to be watching."

"Our results imply that the black hole went dormant in the past 10 years," said Bret Lehmer . He's from both  Johns Hopkins in Baltimore,  MD and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The slumbering black hole is about 5 million times the mass of our sun. It's at the center of the Sculptor galaxy/ NGC 253, a dubbed "starburst galaxy" actively giving birth to new stars.

The galaxy is 13 million light-years away, in the Sculptor galaxy. It's close to our own galaxy, making it one of the nearest starbursts.

The Sculptor galaxy, though, is much quieter and calmer than the Sculptor galaxy. There's activity around, but not within the dormant black hole.

"Black holes feed off surrounding accretion disks of material. When they run out of this fuel, they go dormant."

Galaxies grow throughout history, though, and the Sculptor galaxy and black hole are informing astronomers how this happens.

"The combination of coordinated Chandra and NuSTAR observations is extremely powerful for answering questions like this," Lou Kaluzienski,a  NuSTAR Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Now, we can get all sides of the story."

Still, the finding is a bit unusual, as "Black hole growth and star formation often go hand-in-hand in distant galaxies", according to Daniel Stern, also of the study. But X-ray telescopes have confirmed the findings, he said.

"These stellar-mass black holes are bumping along near the center of this galaxy," said Hornschemeier, another scientist on the NASA study. "They tend to be more numerous in areas where there is more star-formation activity," he said.

The black hole has fallen asleep and gone dormant-but it may have even been dormant 10 years ago, when it was first observed. Chandra first found signs of what seemed to be a funneling fuel to a supermassive black hole in the Sculptor galaxy in 2003.