Doomed star circling supermassive black hole could be ripped apart in less than 6 years

A star in a faraway galaxy is sending itself into a spiral of doom, repeatedly plunging through a disk of hot gas surrounding a black hole and releasing powerful bursts of X-rays in the process. Soon, it will be torn apart.

That's the assessment of what's going on in the core of a galaxy about 300 million light-years away called LEDA 3091738, where a giant black hole nicknamed "Ansky" is being orbited by a much lower-mass companion object.

The name is derived from the black hole's official designation of ZTF10acnsky, as its outbursts were spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility on the Samuel Oschin Telescope at California's Palomar Observatory in 2019.

Now, new findings show that Ansky flares in X-rays roughly every four-and-a-half days, and that each flare lasts one-and-a-half days before dying back down and waiting for the cycle to begin again. Astronomers call these flares "quasi-periodic eruptions," or QPEs. So far, only eight sources of QPEs have been discovered in the entire universe, and Ansky produces the most energetic eruptions of those eight.