On February 11, astronomers saw a distant flash of light that appeared to come from a source as bright as a quadrillion suns. They alerted other scientists to the event, and many telescopes quickly turned to focus on the flash. Now, two teams of researchers have located its source: a feeding black hole in the distant universe.
Black holes are notoriously dark; Its gravity is so strong that not even light can escape event horizons. In this case, the bright flash was caused by how actively the black hole was consuming its meal, a star that passed close to the predatory compact object. Details of this luminous holiday were published today in English-language papers nature And the natural astronomy.
“This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful post-auroor gamma-ray burst,” Dheeraj Pasham, an MIT astrophysicist and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a press release. “It was something extraordinary.”
Every so often, an unlucky star falls into the black hole’s inevitable gravity. The spinning black hole rips the tip of the star apart metaphorically, until the star’s matter is just a superheated swirl around the black hole. These meals can give a lot of light. AT 2022cmc is the brightest and most distant tidal disturbance event known to date; Its source is a supermassive black hole about 8.5 billion light-years away.
Tidal disturbance events are useful to astrophysicists; They can detect How fast are black holes spinning? And the rate which Giant bodies are feeding. They can also reveal how supermassive black holes grow and shape the galaxies they contain.
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Sometimes — and astronomers think they may now know exactly how often — a black hole spews superheated jets of material out into space. The energetic jets accelerate almost to the speed of light and can be very difficult to see unless they are pointed directly at us. Which was the case for the 2022 cc.
Since the black hole’s jet is directed towards Earth, it appears much brighter to us than if it were. This helped the two research teams monitor the light source, despite its unusual distance.
Twenty-one telescopes around the world watched the plane in X-ray, radio, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths. It’s the first time that tidal disturbance has been seen in the optical wavelengths, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see.
The X-ray emissions fluctuated greatly over the course of the observations. Researchers believe that this may be due to a period when the black hole accumulated (i.e. collected) tons of material around itself.
By comparing the light from this event with other luminous events in the universe, the team determined that the tidal disruption event was the only possible cause.
“The universe is really full of surprises and we have to be ready to catch them,” said Andreone. “Developing more new tools and technology is definitely a path of discovery, but it is also perseverance and really wanting to enjoy the sky at any time when we least expect it.”
Basham added that other sky surveys could reveal more tidal disturbances in the future, which could then be examined by space observatories such as the Webb telescope.
Tools like the LSST camera – which will be it The largest digital camera in the world When installed at the Rubin Observatory in Chile – it will be a great resource for regularly imaging the night sky and all its dynamics.
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