A supermassive black hole It violently devoured a huge star, causing a cosmic flare emitting the light of 10 trillion suns, according to a new study.
The black hole explosion, as the phenomenon is known, is believed to be the largest and most distant ever recorded – it was detected 10 billion light years away.
“This is actually a one in a million object,” said Matthew Graham, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy magazine.
Graham said a black hole flare is the most likely explanation based on the intensity and duration of the flare, but follow-up studies will help the researchers confirm their findings.
His It's not unusual for black holes to gobble up nearby stars.gas, dust and other forms of matter, but such a giant flare is extremely rare, Graham said.
“This massive flare is much more energetic than anything we've ever seen before,” he said, adding that at its peak the flare was 30 times brighter than any previous one. black hole flash seen today.
The intensity was due in part to the size of both space objects. The ill-fated star that came too close to the black hole is estimated to be at least 30 times the mass of the Sun. Meanwhile, the huge black hole and its surrounding disk of material are estimated to be 500 million times more massive than the Sun.
The strong surge has been going on for more than seven years and is likely still ongoing, Graham said.
The flare was first discovered in 2018 during an extensive survey of the sky using three ground-based telescopes. At the time, Graham said, it was recorded as a “particularly bright object,” but follow-up observations months later failed to yield much useful information.
Thus, the black hole flare was largely forgotten until 2023, when Graham and his colleagues decided to revisit intriguing points from their previous study. This time, astronomers roughly calculated the distance to a particularly bright object they saw, and the result shocked them.
“All of a sudden it was, 'Oh, that's actually quite far,'” Graham said. “And if it's so far away and so bright, how much energy is released? This is already something unusual and very interesting.”
It is not yet known how exactly the star met his demise, but Graham spoke about the incident space bumper cars may have pushed the star and knocked it out of its normal orbit around the black hole, resulting in a close encounter.
The results help provide a more complete picture of how black holes behave and evolve.
“Our understanding of supermassive black holes and their environments has really changed over the last five to 10 years,” Graham said. “There was a classical idea that most galaxies in the Universe have supermassive black hole in the middle and he just sits there and mumbles and that's it. We now know that this is a much more dynamic environment and we are just beginning to scratch the surface.”
According to him, the flare gradually fades over time, but, most likely, it can be observed in ground-based telescopes for several more years.
