---
title: "This Black Hole Just Glitched"
description: "A supermassive black hole seems to have bugged out: its corona rapidly vanished into nothing before a brand new one took its place."
date: "2020-07-16"
modified: "2020-07-16"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/black-hole-glitched"
categories:
  - "Astrophysics"
  - "Black Holes"
  - "Science & Energy"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "black hole"
  - "corona"
  - "space"
  - "the digest"
---

# This Black Hole Just Glitched

![A supermassive black hole seems to have bugged out: its corona rapidly vanished into nothing before a brand new one took its place.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/black-hole-glitched.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: NASA/Victor Tangermann\</em\>*

## Blink Out

A distant supermassive black hole seems to have restarted itself, in a cosmic glitch so striking it would leave the architects of The Matrix puzzled.

Astronomers observing the black hole watched as its corona, the [incredibly bright ring](<https://futurism.com/scientists-video-black-hole-spewing-matter>) of particles that circles its event horizon, vanished over the course of a year. Then, even more confusingly, it reappeared, as though the entire black hole was turned off and on again.

## Celestial Phoenix

In just a year, which is blazingly fast on a celestial time scale, the corona dimmed 10,000 times over. Then, in a few months, it formed a new one that's now [almost as bright](<https://futurism.com/astronomers-find-nearest-black-hole-earth>) as the original.

"We expect that luminosity changes this big should vary on timescales of many thousands to millions of years," MIT physicist Erin Kara [said in a press release](<https://news.mit.edu/2020/black-hole-corona-reappear-0716>). "But in this object, we saw it change by 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling."

## Gummed Up

The scientists suspect that something gummed up the works: [According to research](<https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab91a1>) published Thursday in *The Astrophysical Journal Letters*, the black hole may have eaten a star that jammed everything up like a wrench stuck in a machine's gears.

"This will be really important to understanding how a black hole’s corona is heated and powered in the first place," Kara added.

**READ MORE:** [In a first, astronomers watch a black hole’s corona disappear, then reappear](<https://news.mit.edu/2020/black-hole-corona-reappear-0716>) \[MIT\]

**More on black holes:** *[Astronomers Find Nearest Black Hole to Earth, and It’s Strange](<https://futurism.com/astronomers-find-nearest-black-hole-earth>)*

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)