A black hole just had a solar storm — magnetic eruptions like our Sun's, at monster scale

Our Sun occasionally snaps its magnetic field lines and throws off a storm. Now two space telescopes — XRISM, led by Japan's space agency with NASA and ESA, and ESA's XMM-Newton — have caught a black hole doing something eerily similar. Watching the corona, the searing halo of gas around a feeding black hole, astronomers found evidence of magnetic reconnection: field lines breaking and rejoining, releasing bursts of energy, much as they do above the Sun's surface, only in one of the most extreme environments in the universe. The finding, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, matters because these eruptions may help explain how black holes launch energy back into their galaxies. The physics of a star and a monster, it turns out, rhyme.