The Sun throws tantrums all the time — giant eruptions of X-rays and charged particles that can knock out satellites and light up Earth’s skies. Astronomers have long suspected that the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies might do something very similar. Now, for the first time ever, they have actually caught one in the act.
A team of researchers led by doctoral student Gal Vardi at Israel’s Technion, under the supervision of Professor Ehud Behar, has presented the first observational evidence of a solar-storm-like eruption in the corona of a supermassive black hole. The discovery, published this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, shows that the violent physics behind solar storms can play out around objects millions of times more massive than the Sun.
The black hole in NGC 3783
The eruption was spotted around the supermassive black hole at the heart of NGC 3783, an active galaxy roughly 130 million light-years from Earth. Because the galaxy’s black hole is actively feeding, it is surrounded by a blazing-hot corona of X-ray-emitting gas — the same term astronomers use for the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
Using the XRISM space telescope — a joint mission of NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the European Space Agency (ESA) — along with ESA’s veteran XMM-Newton telescope, the team watched X-rays streaming from the black hole’s neighborhood. What they saw was unmistakable.
A flare with a solar signature
The observations captured a flare with a very specific X-ray fingerprint: the soft and hard X-rays evolved in lockstep, following a pattern called the Neupert effect. This timing pattern was first discovered on the Sun in 1968 and has been seen in countless solar flares since — but it had never before been observed around a black hole.
The Neupert effect is the smoking gun of magnetic reconnection, the process in which twisted magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, dumping vast amounts of stored energy into heat and particle acceleration. On the Sun, the same process powers solar flares and coronal mass ejections — the very events we call solar storms.
During the eruption, the team also detected an ultra-fast outflow of material blasting away from the black hole’s region — the black-hole equivalent of a coronal mass ejection. In a normal solar storm, a CME is the wave of charged particles that can disrupt power grids and communications on Earth. Near NGC 3783’s black hole, the outflow was moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
First observation of its kind
Scientists have suspected for years that the blazing X-ray glow around feeding black holes is heated by magnetic reconnection, just as magnetic processes heat the Sun’s corona. But until now, nobody had caught the process in the act. This study is the first observational evidence of a magnetic reconnection flare in the corona of an active supermassive black hole.
“This is the first observation of magnetic reconnection eruptions and a coronal mass ejection in a black hole corona,” the researchers note — a milestone that confirms the physical processes behind solar storms are universal, operating in environments that could not be more different from our quiet Sun.
How powerful was it?
From the energy released, the team estimated that the magnetic field annihilated during the flare exceeded 13,000 Gauss — for comparison, the Sun’s surface magnetic field is typically around 1 to 2 Gauss, and even powerful sunspots reach only a few thousand Gauss. The flare erupted from a magnetic loop extending at most 30 gravitational radii above the black hole — astonishingly close to the point of no return.
Why it matters
The result is more than a cosmic curiosity. If the same physics drives eruptions on the Sun and in the most extreme environments in the universe, scientists can use each system to understand the other. Solar physicists get a new laboratory for studying magnetic reconnection under conditions impossible to reproduce on Earth, while black-hole researchers gain a proven framework for explaining how these monsters heat their surroundings and shape entire galaxies.
It also reminds us that the universe speaks a single physical language. A storm on the Sun and a storm around a black hole 130 million light-years away can be, at their core, the very same event — written in magnetic fields.
Sources: Phys.org, “Black hole observations uncover evidence of solar storm–like magnetic eruptions” (Oct 22, 2026); Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, “Solar Storms Around a Black Hole” (Oct 18, 2026); ScienMag (Oct 22, 2026); Vardi et al., “Observation of a Solar-like Magnetic Reconnection Event in an AGN Corona with XRISM,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2026), DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae8f44.