A Black Hole Consumed a Star and Released the Light of a Trillion Suns - Universe Today
The Zwicky Transient Facility is housed at California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory. Image: CIT/Palomar Observatory.
As the title tells us, the transient light source was a jet of matter emitted from a supermassive black hole at 99.9% of the speed of light. The light signal has a name, AT 2022cmc, and the SMBH responsible for it is halfway across the Universe. What caused it? Something extraordinary, according to lead author Pasham.
“This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow,” lead author Pasham said in a press release. “It was something extraordinary.” “The last time scientists discovered one of these jets was well over a decade ago,” said Michael Coughlin, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and co-lead on the paper. “From the data we have, we can estimate that relativistic jets are launched in only 1% of these destructive events, making AT2022cmc an extremely rare occurrence. In fact, the luminous flash from the event is among the brightest ever observed.
This artist’s impression illustrates how it might look when a star approaches too close to a black hole, where the star is squeezed by the intense gravitational pull of the black hole. Some of the star’s material gets pulled in and swirls around the black hole forming the disc that can be seen in this image. In rare cases, such as this one, jets of matter and radiation are shot out from the poles of the black hole. Image Credit: ESO/M.
“We know there is one supermassive black hole per galaxy, and they formed very quickly in the universe’s first million years,” says co-author Matteo Lucchini, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “That tells us they feed very fast, though we don’t know how that feeding process works. So, sources like a TDE can actually be a really good probe for how that process happens.
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