Adam Ingram

The black hole GS 1354-64 in the constellation Musca woke up in 2025 and began greedily pulling matter from its companion star. The orbiting X-ray telescope IXPE caught it at a rare moment: the outburst had already subsided, but the system had not yet settled down.

In 2026, a black hole in the binary system GS 1354-64 woke up: it began pulling matter from its companion star, and a scorching disk swirled around it.

At the heart of galaxy 1ES 1927+654, a black hole behaves like a lighthouse with a faulty mechanism. Every six and a half minutes, it releases a burst of X-ray light, a rhythm astronomers have been tracking since 2022. At first, the beacon's tempo wandered — speeding up and slowing down, with intervals ranging from one beat every eighteen minutes to one every seven.