J1007+3540: The Black Hole That Reawakened
J1007+3540 is an elliptical galaxy two billion light-years away in the constellation Leo Minor. In 2007, radio astronomers at the University of Leiden discovered something unprecedented in its radio signature: two sets of jets separated by a gap of roughly one hundred million years. The black hole at its center had gone completely silent — and then restarted.
Using LOFAR, the Low-Frequency Array spanning northern Europe, a team led by Aleksandar Shulevski mapped the full history of this galaxy's outbursts. The new jets, crushed by pressure from the surrounding intergalactic medium, formed a structure resembling a volcanic plume — wide at the base, narrowing at the top. This morphology challenges standard models of how black holes inject energy into their environments.
The discovery suggests that supermassive black hole feedback is not continuous but episodic, with dormant periods lasting longer than the entire history of complex animal life on Earth. J1007+3540 joins a small but growing class of restarted radio galaxies that are reshaping our understanding of galaxy evolution.
References:
Shulevski et al. (2022) — LOFAR observations of J1007+3540
LOFAR — Low-Frequency Array, ASTRON
#J1007 #BlackHole #RadioGalaxy #LOFAR #Astrophysics #CosmicVolcano #GalaxyEvolution #SpaceDocumentary #ActiveGalacticNuclei #DeepSpace
📖 CHAPTERS
0:00 In the northern sky between Ursa
1:20 At the center of J10073540 sits
2:40 Spread across the Netherlands Germany Poland
4:00 A second possibility is internal Gas
5:20 The old lobes returned spectral ages
6:40 This changes how astrophysicists calculate the
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