Astronomers have observed the largest and most distant flare ever observed from a supermassive black hole. Dubbed “Superman,” the flash originated 10 billion light-years from Earth, and the light emitted at its peak was 10 trillion solar rays.
The source of the flash is the active galactic nucleus, or AGN – the bright, compact region at the center of the galaxy – powered by a supermassive black hole that is actively feeding on matter. Gas and dust enter the rotating disk around the black hole, and as the debris spirals faster, it overheats, emitting intense radiation.
Researchers wondered what the supermassive black hole used to produce such a powerful flash. They concluded that it likely consumed a massive star that would otherwise have been destined to end its life by exploding.
“About 1 in 10,000 AGNs show some kind of burst activity, but it’s so extreme that it’s in its own category (that’s about a 1-in-a-million event),” Matthew Graham, a professor of astronomy at the Cal Institute of Technology, said in an email. Graham is the lead author of a study on the unprecedented phenomenon, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The flash shows that there are unknown populations of giant stars near the centers of large galaxies, which also contain supermassive black holes, and reveals the complex interactions between the two behemoths.
A huge celebration of stars
Superman was first detected by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey and the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California in 2018. in November. Zwicky, which scans the night sky with a wide-field camera, has a reputation for allowing astronomers to quickly detect such transient or short-lived, short-lived, short-lived lightning phenomena.
At first, the object didn’t seem unusual, just bright, Graham said. The team of astronomers thought it was a blazar, or supermassive black hole, that fires energetic jets of matter through space.
Five years later, they reviewed the early data from the Zwicky survey and noticed one signal, previously thought to be a blazar, that was constantly changing in brightness. The team recorded follow-up observations with other telescopes, such as the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which revealed that the light source was brighter and more energetic than first thought.
Light, They realized that it came from the active core of a galaxy that is 500 million times more massive than our sun.
The Samuel Oschin Telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory, home of the Zwicky Transient Facility. Zwicky helped detect the powerful Superman flare in 2018. – Palomar/Caltech
Astronomers considered several possible reasons for the burst being so bright, such as a massive star exploding in a disk of material around the black hole, before determining that the most likely cause is a tidal event – when a star gets too close to the black hole and explodes.
The flash is ongoing, meaning the black hole is still actively devouring the star, like “a fish halfway down a whale’s gullet,” Graham said.
Superman reached a peak brightness that was 30 times brighter than any other known black hole flare, and the star consumed by the black hole is at least 30 times the mass of the sun. The previous record for a tidal event was ZTF20abrbeie, nicknamed the “scary Barbie,” which occurred when a black hole swallowed a star three to 10 times the size of our sun.
“This is probably the most massive star ever seen by a supermassive black hole,” study co-author KE Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at Manhattan Community College and associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said in a statement. “This is interesting because it tells us that massive stars must live in and around gas disks around supermassive black holes.
A look into the hearts of galaxies
The team continues to watch the flare as it fades over time, although time passes differently near the black hole than it does on Earth, Graham said.
“This is a phenomenon called cosmological time dilation due to the stretching of space and time. As light travels through expanding space to reach us, its wavelength is stretched, just like time itself,” he said. “Seven years is two years here. We’re watching the event at quarter speed.”
Since the flash occurred 10 billion light years away, it took 10 billion years for the light to reach Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).
Revisiting the Zwicky data and using new telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile may make it possible to detect more of these rare events, which show that supermassive black holes have dynamic environments and are much more than large sinkholes surrounded by rotating material, Graham said.
Flashes like this reveal the presence of incredibly large stars near the hearts of galaxies and reveal the very structure of galaxies, Ford said.
“Understanding the stars in the centers of galaxies (how many there are, what they are like) at such early times in the universe gives us a new way to study galaxy assembly in general,” she noted.
The discovery is a stunning leap forward in our understanding of the most powerful events in the Universe, said Dr. Danny Milisavljevic, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. Milisavljevic was not involved in the new study, but previously researched the “scary Barbie” incident.
“We once thought the ‘scary Barbie’ was a strange, unique anomaly, but this new flare is even more extreme, releasing as much energy as if the entire Sun were completely converted to electromagnetic radiation,” he wrote in an email.
“It belongs to an emerging class of extreme nuclear transits (ENTs), a poorly understood phenomenon that challenges our current models of the interaction between black holes and stars.”
The flash reveals insights into the growth of black holes, how they tear apart nearby stars and how their immense energy can shape the galaxies around them, said Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko was not involved in the new study, but his work laid a strong foundation for the active physics of galactic nuclei.
“When a supermassive black hole suddenly erupts in a spectacular burst, astronomers find themselves in the front row with some of the most extreme physicists in the Universe,” he wrote in an email. “By capturing this record-breaking brightness, astronomers have opened a new window into the extreme physics of galactic centers, where stars, gas and gravity collide in the Universe’s cruelest laboratories.”
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