A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy some 8.5 billion years away has ripped apart nearby stars, producing some of the brightest jets ever seen.
If a star or other object gets too close to a supermassive black hole, it will be destroyed by the black hole’s immense gravity.
These phenomena, known as tidal disruption events (TDEs), cause an orbiting disk of matter to be slowly drawn into the black hole, occasionally causing a luminous burst of nearby moving matter, as in the case of the supermassive black hole AT2022cmc. Release a jet. speed of light.
Glowing rays occur with an estimated 1% chance and are considered a type of astronomical phenomenon called ephemeral due to their short lifespan. A bright flash from the
jet was spotted in Zwicky Temporary Facility (ZTF) data in February of this year. This data uses special new technology that can sift through a million pages worth of information every night.
New data analysis methods yielded rapid results, allowing the US research team to rapidly track transients using multi-wavelength observations of the system from various observatories.
Jet is visible across many wavelengths from her X-rays to radio waves, and tracking observations allow the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to place her AT2022cmc 8.5 billion light-years away. I was. NASA’s Hubble Telescope pinpointed her AT2022cmc position.
“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 published in Nature. “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.”
Exactly why this behaviour is so rare remains an enigma, however, the research team believe that AT2022cmc`s rapid spin powers the jets, adding to the current understanding of the physics of these behemoth dead stars at the centres of galaxies.
This detection – and the method used to discover it – are valuable as a future models for astronomers as they scour the skies for more events. “Scientists can use AT2022cmc as a model for what to look for and find more disruptive events from distant black holes,” says lead author Igor Andreoni, from the Department of Astronomy at UMD and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.
This includes using ground-based optical surveys, as opposed to gamma-ray observatories in space – how previous jets were primarily discovered.
“Our new search technology will help us quickly identify rare space events in ZTF survey data,” says Andreoni.
“And with the ZTF and upcoming large-scale surveys such as Vera Rubin’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which frequently scans the skies, we now have an abundance of rare or previously discovered We can expect to discover and study in detail cosmic events that never existed before.” It is an ever more important tool for expanding our knowledge of the universe. “
