They have discovered a star-eating black hole at its furthest distance to date.

Astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) observed how hole black supermassive devours star nearby and releases powerful jets at the farthest point of the universe.

The discovery named AT2022cmc, occurred as ZTF data was being studied with a new method designed to alert astronomers of such rare events in near real time. The results are published in Nature.

ZTF, located in San Diego, California, is currently one of the largest transient studies that astronomers use to study the ever-changing universe and is a treasure trove of rare, strange, and unusual events that astronomers often discover by accident.

“Our new search method helps us quickly identify rare space events in the ZTF survey data. And because the ZTF and upcoming larger surveys such as Vera Rubin’s LSST scan the sky so frequently, we can now hope to detect a large number of previously undiscovered or rare cosmic phenomena and study them in detail,” said Igor Andreoni, researcher at the UMD Department of Astronomy and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

unique event

AT2022cmc this is a special case of what is known as a tidal disruption event or TDE. TDEs occur when star which is close to black hole it is violently torn apart by gravitational tidal forces, similar to how the Moon pulls the tides on Earth, but with greater force. Next, pieces star are written to a disk that is rapidly spinning around black hole. Finally, black hole absorb what’s left of the doomed star on the disk.

In extremely rare cases, for example AT2022cmc, black hole supermassive launches of “relativistic jets” – beams of matter moving at a speed close to the speed of light – after annihilation star. Discovered in February 2022, astronomers led by Andreoni continued their work. AT2022cmc and observed it with several devices at different wavelengths.

“The last time scientists detected one of these jets was more than a decade ago,” recalls Michael Coughlin, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities and co-leader of the study. % of these destructive events, which makes AT2022cmc be an extremely rare event. In fact, the bright flash of this event is one of the brightest ever observed.”

A new method of data analysis, equivalent to viewing a million pages of information every night, allowed Andreoni and his colleagues to quickly analyze ZTF data and identify TDE AT2022cmc with relativistic jets. They quickly began follow-up observations that revealed an exceptionally bright phenomenon across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to millimeters and radio.

far exactly

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has shown that AT2022cmc It was at a cosmological distance of 8.5 billion light years. Optical/infrared images from the Hubble Space Telescope and radio observations from the Very Large Array have pinpointed the location AT2022cmc with the utmost precision.

Researchers believe that AT2022cmc was at the center of the galaxy, which is not yet visible, because the light from AT2022cmc overshadows it, but future space-based observations with the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes could detect the galaxy when the transient eventually fades.

It is still a mystery why some TDEs splatter and others don’t. From their observations, Andreoni and his team concluded that black holes from AT2022cmc and from other TDEs with similar jets, they are likely to rotate rapidly, driving extremely bright jets. This suggests that a quick turn black hole it may be a necessary component for launching jets, and this idea brings researchers closer to understanding the physics of jets. black holes superarrays at the center of galaxies thousands of light-years away.

Before AT2022cmc, only a couple of possible TDE jets have been known, discovered mostly by gamma ray spaceflights that detect the highest energy forms of radiation produced by these jets. With his new method, astronomers can now look for these rare phenomena in ground-based optical surveys.

“Astronomy is changing rapidly,” Andreoni emphasizes. “More and more optical and infrared surveys of the sky are now active or will soon be launched. Scientists can use AT2022cmc as a model for searching and finding more destructive events black holes far. This means that, more than ever, big data mining is an essential tool for expanding our knowledge of the universe” (Europa Press).

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