Scientists detected the most energetic and brightest flash ever observed from a supermassive black hole, caused when this cosmic colossus ripped apart and devoured a giant star that got too close.
The phenomenon, first detected in 2018 with a camera at the Palomar Observatory in California, shone with an intensity 10 trillion times greater than that of the Sun, and its brightness has been slowly diminishing since then.
The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomyindicates that the black hole responsible has a mass of about 300 million suns and is located in a galaxy located about 10 billion light years from Earth, making this flash the most distant and luminous observed so far. It comes from a time when the universe was still young. (One light year is equivalent to almost 9.7 trillion kilometers).
Unprecedented flash
“At first, we didn’t really believe the energy numbers,” admitted Matthew Graham, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and lead author of the study. “It is reasonable to think that [la estrella] “It collided with another more massive body in its original orbit, which essentially pushed it towards the black hole… too far, as was later shown,” he added.
According to researchers, the destroyed star was between 30 and 200 times the mass of the Sun, a cosmic rarity both for its size and its short life. When the star was attracted by the enormous gravity of the black hole, its material stretched extremely before falling into the abyss, releasing a huge amount of energy and causing the dazzling explosion.
“The star came so close that it was stretched until it became long and thin… That material then spiraled around the black hole as it fell,” explained astronomer KE Saavik Ford, co-author of the study.
The event was so powerful that its brightness increased 40-fold during observations and peaked in June 2018, being 30 times more luminous than any previously recorded black hole flash.
A look at the early universe
The scientists, who used telescopes in California, Arizona and Hawaii, ruled out other explanations such as supernovae, jets of material or gravitational lensing effects. Although the flash still continues, its luminosity slowly decreases, and the entire phenomenon is expected to last about 11 years. “The sparkle is still fading,” Graham concluded.
The discovery also allows researchers to “examine the interaction of supermassive black holes with their environment in the early stages of the universe,” explained Joseph Michail of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the study.
Edited by Erick Elola with information from Reuters and AP.
