Astronomers Watch In Awe As A Giant Black Hole Tears Apart A Star 12.4 Billion Light-Years Away
An artist’s impression off a “tidal disruption event” as a black hole rips apart a Sun-like star.
Astronomers have had the incredible opportunity to observe a powerful “tidal disruption event” as a distant supermassive black hole ripped apart a star to produce a jet of light moving close to the speed of light.
It’s only the fourth time ever that such a rare event has been observed.
A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so intense that nothing can escape—even light. A “tidal disruption event“(TDE) is how a black hole grows; it essentially pulls a star rapidly towards it, thus destroying it.
As the star disintegrates its matter falls into the black hole’s disk, which slightly expands. What can occasionally be seen next are powerful luminous jets of matter traveling close to the speed of light.
That’s what astronomers were able to see with this lucky observation, which the authors of two papers published (here and here) in Nature and Nature Astronomy this week call AT2022cmc.
AT2022cmc occurred on February 11, 2022 at the jaw-dropping distance of 12.4 billion light years. Most seen before have been much closer.
It was observed only thanks to its incredible brightness by ground-based telescopes including Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California—which first detected it—as well as the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey in Hawaii, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico and the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile.
This is what the astronomers saw.
They were detected and observed in visible light, but also in X-rays (which are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere) by the orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (Swift).
It’s this X-ray light data that helped astronomers determine the extreme energies involved.
It’s thought that AT2022cmc was the result of a Sun-like star being attacked by a a relatively low-mass black hole. By modelling the physics involved in the event the scientists calculated that only 1% of TDEs display the “relativistic jets” seen in AT2022cmc—confirming its rarity.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
