Astronomers Found Strange Bright Flash, Predicted from Black Hole

VIVA – Recently, in a study just published in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers found that a mysterious and strange ultra-bright flash observed earlier this year at several telescopes across the planet likely came from the tip of an ultra-massive black hole called a Blazar. 

The sudden bright flash was first observed in data from the Palomar Observatory in California, USA appearing in a part of the sky where such light had never been observed before.

According to estimates, the power of light is more than a thousand trillion times the brightness of the Sun, which is highly unlikely to be seen with the naked eye. 

In response, scientists from around the world trained their equipment on the mysterious and powerful new light source in an attempt to deduce its properties. They think it's a supermassive black hole eating a star. 

The black hole, named AT 2022cmc is about 8.5 billion light-years away but became visible due to a "tidal disruption event" (TDE), or when a star is torn apart by the tremendous tidal gravitational forces in and around the black hole.

Supermassive black holes often anchor the centers of galaxies and the most powerful ones shoot out jets of ionized matter at speeds close to the speed of light. Astronomers call them "blazars" and when the beam is pointed at Earth, it looks like one of the brightest objects in the Universe. 

"We know there is one supermassive black hole per galaxy, and they formed very quickly in the first million years of the universe," A writer, Mattheo Lucchini remarked. 

It tells researchers that they feed very quickly despite not knowing how the feeding process works, according to the Sputniknews website, Friday, December 2, 2022.

"So, a source like the TDE can be a very good probe of how that process happens," Mattheo remarked. 

To produce such powerful jets, the black hole must be in a very active phase. 

"It's probably swallowing stars at a rate of half a solar mass per year. A lot of this tidal disruption happens early on, and we were able to capture this event right at the beginning, within a week of the black hole starting to eat the star," added the other author.