Astronomers discovered the most distant black hole devouring and tearing apart a star through the stellar remnants hurled directly toward Earth, according to a report by Space.com.
Since the jet is aimed directly at Earth, astronomers were able to observe the fast destruction of the star by this black hole, known as a tidal disruption event (TDE).
The discovery might usher in a new way to observe such catastrophic events, which are frequently only visible in X-rays and gamma-rays due to their great intensity.
TDE Discovery: AT2022cmc
TDEs are caused by stars that venture near black holes. Extremely powerful tidal forces tear the star apart as a result of the black hole's gravitational attraction.
ESO notes that the black hole also releases plasma and radiation jets from its poles in around 1% of TDEs.
In February, the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile swung into action to study an unusual source of visible light that had been discovered by researchers using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a survey telescope in California.
The TDE discovery was since named AT2022cmc.
Astronomers claim that AT2022cmc initially resembled a gamma-ray burst, the universe's most powerful source of electromagnetic radiation.
AT2022cmc was studied by a total of 21 telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray instrument aboard the ISS.
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Two Peculiar Observations
Two surprising observations were made with the help of vast data. The source of the light, AT2022cmc, started its journey from Earth at a record-breaking distance when the universe was only 13.8 billion years old, only one-third of its current age.
The second observation found that the event was not a gamma-ray burst. The team said that the signal remained 100 times more powerful than a gamma-ray ever seen, which makes it an "extraordinary" discovery.
These results were compared to studies of other fierce phenomena, such as falling stars and the powerful cosmic explosions known as kilonovas.
The only scenario in which a TDE jet, which contains matter flying at 99.99% the speed of light, aimed directly at Earth, corresponded to the light profile seen by these telescopes.
This marks the first observation of a jetting TDE, a type of violent star-killing event that was previously only seen in high-energy radiation such as X-rays and gamma-rays.
The discovery of AT2022cmc in optical light may open up a novel approach for finding these jet-firing TDEs throughout the vastness of space, allowing deeper research of these unusual occurrences and the black holes that create them.
Two papers describing the study were released in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Nov. 30.
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