A black hole released energy equivalent to 1,000 trillion suns directly to Earth

On February 11, 2022, several ground and space observatories were alerted to an unusual source of visible light that had been captured in a region of the night sky where there was nothing before. According to the scientists’ first calculations, the emitted light was as powerful as 1,000 trillion suns.

Now, almost 10 months later, an international team of astronomers, led by Matteo Lucchini and Dheeraj Pasham, suggests that this signal, called AT 2022cmc it was the result of a supermassive black hole—those found at the center of all galaxies—devouring a nearby star and spewing its remains toward Earth.

The phenomenon has been described in a Nature Astronomy article.

Initially, the bright signal AT 2022cmc was mistaken for a gamma-ray burst, which is the most luminous event to be found in the universe.

However, after 21 telescopes that observe the cosmos at different wavelengths—including NASA’s Hubble and the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope—pointed at AT 2022cmc, they noted that the event was “100 times stronger than the most powerful glow of the gamma-ray burst.”

For that reason, the authors suggested another theory to explain the extreme luminosity: a supermassive black hole located 8.5 billion light-years away had torn apart a star and, in an almost chance event, ejected jets of matter in our direction.

Such conditions would have made this phenomenon, also known as “tidal disruption events” (or TDEs), the brightest observed and also captured at optical wavelengths, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum. visible by the human eye.

Detecting more “tidal disruption events” in the future will help us learn how fast supermassive black holes spin, the rate at which they feed, and how they grow and shape the galaxies they hide.

According to Dheeraj Pasham, one of the authors, for such an intense jet of matter to be produced, the black hole would have to be in an extremely active phase, which he describes as a “hyperfeeding frenzy.”

“It is probably swallowing the star at the rate of half the mass of the sun per year,” Pasham estimates. “Much of this TDE occurs early on, and we were able to detect this event early on, within a week of the black hole starting to feed on the star,” he added.

Source-larepublica.pe