A supermassive black hole 300 million light-years away has astrophysicists stumped.

It lurks at the center of a galaxy called SDSS1335+0728, and, since 2019, researchers have been watching in real-time as it awoke from a quiescent slumber and started blazing with activity, belching out a series of eruptions of light.

This in itself is consistent with how we know supermassive black holes to behave. But the behavior of this particular black hole – nicknamed Ansky – is so weird and wild that it’s challenging to explain.

The popular perception of a black hole is that of a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sitting in space constantly slurping up everything around it. This is only part of the rich and complex existence of the densest known objects in the Universe.

Like anything with mass, their gravitational reach only extends so far; supermassive black holes can go through periods of raging activity, and periods of relative quiet, during which they just sort of sit there not really accreting much material at all. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for instance, is relatively quiescent.