This rare event occurred 8.5 billion light years away from Earth. (Pixabay/Representative image)
An incredibly bright flash that appeared in the night sky in February came from a black hole pointing directly at Earth, according to astronomers. This discovery marks the most distant event scientists have ever reported and the first instance in which it was detected with visible light.
The latest findings are presented in two papers. One, “A very bright jet from the disruption of a star by a massive black hole,” published in Nature. The other, ‘The birth of a relativistic jet after the disruption of a star by a cosmological black hole’, was published in Nature Astronomy.
Scientists explained that the bright light that reached Earth was the result of a star getting too close to a supermassive black hole, eventually meeting its end there when it was torn apart. The rare cosmic event occurred 8.5 billion light years away from our planet. The signal from the light burst, known as AT 2022cmc, was first picked up by the Zwicky transient facility at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory on February 11.
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According to astronomers, when stars get too close to a black hole, they break apart and the explosion can be detected across the universe. This event is known as a Tidal Disturbance Event or TDE. Astronomers have observed these events before, but AT 2022cmc is brighter than any previously discovered. And it’s also the most distant ever observed.
According to CNN, scientists believe that when the black hole swallowed the star, it released a massive amount of energy and sent a jet of material into space at near the speed of light. It’s likely that the light burst appeared so bright in our sky because the beam was aimed directly at Earth, creating what’s known as a “Doppler boost” effect.
In the paper, the astronomers said that gamma-ray bursts, the powerful jets of X-rays released when massive stars collapse, typically account for the brightest flashes in the night sky. “However, as bright as they are, there is only so much light a collapsing star can produce. Because AT 2022cmc was so bright and lasted so long, we knew that something really gigantic had to feed: a supermassive black hole,” he said. Benjamin Gompertz, co-author of the Nature Astronomy study.
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In addition, the researchers determined that AT 2022cmc was “100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray afterglow” previously recorded, according to Dheeraj Pasham, study author of the Nature Astronomy paper. Astronomers still do not understand why some tidal disruption events create these jets while others do not. Now observing more events like this could reveal how black holes launch such powerful jets into space, they said.
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