Why Is This Galaxy Flickering Like A Flame? Scientists Solve The Mystery

The mystery of a distant galaxy, observed to have been brightening and dimming like a flickering flame, has been perplexing scientists over three decades. Now, according to a report in a space website, the puzzle of the blinking galaxy has finally been solved.

Markarian 1018, as the galaxy is known as, is supposed to be an active galaxy, which means it has an active galactic nucleus (AGN), implying an extremely bright core. Usually, AGNs do not take up a lot of space, but the light they emit can outshine the radiation of all the stars in their galaxy put together.

Furthermore, supermassive black holes lie at the center of many active galaxies, which cause light to radiate when materials fall into them. Therefore, when enough material is not falling into the black hole, the light of the AGNs dims. According to the NASA scientists, this is precisely what is happening to the Markarian 1018 galaxy.

The researchers based their study on the data collected from numerous observatories such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and telescopes like the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Hubble Space Telescope. However, at the moment, the scientists are not too sure about the cause of the starvation, wherein enough materials are not falling into the black hole. Two papers describing these results appeared in the September 2016 issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

According to some of the astronomers who conducted the study, the reason could be attributed to the presence of a second black hole in the galaxy, which is disturbing the flow of material into the first black hole. In addition, this could be a plausible solution because the Markarian 1018 had formed with the collision of two galaxies, both of which had black holes in their centers.