In the center of galaxy J2344 five years ago, a black hole tore apart a star, and now scorching gas bubbles there — a cosmic “stew pot”. Every 12 hours, giant X-ray bubbles rise in it, and on their ascent, super-hot splashes lasting 5–30 minutes appear. At first, this strange double pulsation was dismissed as a detector glitch — but the rhythm held day after day.
The mechanism was unraveled by X-ray telescopes Einstein and XMM-Newton, confirming the ideas of Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose. The culprit is likely an invisible companion — a stellar remnant or a small black hole orbiting the central supermassive black hole. With each close approach, the companion shakes the disk, generating the main flare, and then, like a wake, a short micro-burst. Such systems are called extreme inspirals. Someday a gravitational-wave observatory will catch them — and we will hear space itself stretch and squeeze.
as written by the authors arXiv:2602.03932
We report the discovery of complex flaring activity from the galactic nucleus hosting the five-year-old tidal disruption event eRASSt J234402.9-352640 (J2344). With Einstein Probe and XMM-Newton observations, we detected highly structured soft X-ray variability. Through temporal decomposition of the XMM-Newton light curve and time-resolved spectral analysis, we identified broad, thermal flares recurring every $$\sim$$12 hours and lasting $$\sim$$2 hours, consistent with quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs). Remarkably, these QPEs are accompanied by an unprecedented crest of hotter, shorter flares, each lasting between 5 and 30 minutes. These flares are predominantly found in the rising phases of the QPEs, although they also appear throughout the quiescence. These findings establish J2344 as a new member of the QPE emitter population and uncover a previously unobserved phenomenology that challenges current models of QPEs. In this letter, we present the phenomenological properties of this unique source and discuss possible interpretations within the framework of extreme-mass-ratio inspirals.
A star being ripped apart by a black hole is a once-in-10,000-to-100,000-year event for each large galaxy; catching one in real time happens once in an astronomer’s generation.