Prepare to be amazed by a cosmic spectacle that has left astronomers in awe! A black hole flare, so powerful and distant, has been spotted, challenging our understanding of the universe.
In a dramatic twist, a massive star, destined to become a brilliant supernova, met an ironic fate. It ventured too close to a colossal black hole, which devoured it, tearing the star apart into tiny fragments. This extraordinary event, described in a recent study published in Nature Astronomy, has unveiled the most intense and remote energy flare ever recorded from a supermassive black hole.
The cosmic object, first observed in 2018 by the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, rapidly intensified by a factor of 40 over several months. At its peak, it outshone any previous black hole flare by a staggering 30 times, emitting the light of 10 trillion suns!
This supermassive black hole, known as J2245+3743, is estimated to be 500 million times more massive than our sun and resides an incredible 10 billion light-years away. Due to the finite speed of light, we observe this distant event as it occurred in the past, when the universe was still young.
Lead author Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at Caltech, emphasizes the uniqueness of this phenomenon: "The energetics reveal an object that is incredibly distant and incredibly bright. This is unlike any AGN we've encountered before."
As astronomers continue to monitor this fading flare, time itself seems to be playing tricks. Due to the cosmological time dilation caused by the stretching of space and time, the event appears to be playing back at a quarter speed compared to our perception of time.
"It's as if we're watching a fish being swallowed by a whale, but only halfway through the process," Graham explains, referring to the ongoing nature of the flare. The researchers believe this extraordinary event is a tidal disruption event (TDE), where a supermassive black hole's gravity tears apart a star that ventures too close, slowly consuming it over time.
If this interpretation is correct, the supermassive black hole has devoured a star with a mass at least 30 times greater than our sun. The previous record holder for the largest candidate TDE, nicknamed Scary Barbie, pales in comparison, being 30 times weaker and originating from a different AGN.
Most TDEs do not occur around AGN, which are massive structures consisting of supermassive black holes surrounded by large disks of material. These AGN can mask TDE bursts, making them harder to detect. However, the recent jumbo flare, J2245+3743, was so massive that it stood out.
Initially, J2245+3743 did not appear extraordinary. In 2018, a spectrum of its light obtained from the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory revealed nothing unusual. It was only in 2023, when the team noticed the flare decaying slower than expected, that they obtained another spectrum from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai'i, revealing its extreme brightness.
Co-author K. E. Saavik Ford, a professor at the City University of New York, explains: "At first, it was crucial to establish that this extreme object was truly this bright. It was possible that it was beaming the light toward us rather than glowing in all directions, but data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission helped rule that out."
After ruling out other scenarios, the researchers concluded that J2245+3743 was indeed the brightest black hole flare ever recorded. "If you converted our entire sun to energy using Einstein's famous formula, E = mc2, that's the amount of energy pouring out from this flare since we began observing it," Ford adds.
The team's favored explanation for this extraordinary brightness is a supermassive black hole slowly tearing apart a massive star. "Stars of this size are rare, but we believe stars within the disk of an AGN can grow larger. The matter from the disk accumulates onto stars, causing them to increase in mass," Ford explains.
The discovery of such a mega-proportioned black hole meal suggests that similar events are likely occurring throughout the cosmos. The researchers aim to delve deeper into ZTF data to uncover more, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory may also detect unusually large TDEs.
"We wouldn't have found this rare event without ZTF," Graham emphasizes. "With seven years of sky observation under our belt, we can see what these objects have done in the past and how they will evolve."
This groundbreaking discovery has opened a new chapter in our understanding of the universe, leaving us with a thought-provoking question: Could there be other cosmic phenomena out there, waiting to be discovered, that challenge our current knowledge?
