One Black hole it swallowed a star and fired relativistic jets at some corner of the universe far from our galaxy — enough to be the most distant black hole food astronomers have ever observed. The discovery became possible only because the jets were directed in our direction.
When a star gets too close to a black hole, a powerful gravitational force begins to tear it apart. stretching your matter like spaghetti🇧🇷 This is a one-way process. Although it has not yet passed through the event horizon (a point from which not even light can escape), the star is broken.
This event, dubbed AT2022cmc, was discovered in February this year by ZTF, an autonomous system that tracks and extracts information about unusual phenomena in the universe in visible light. Therefore, scientists sent several telescopes around the world to observe the source of radiation at other wavelengths.
Many wavelengths have been detected in the radiation released from this event, from gamma rays to radio waves, in addition to visible light itself. This was possible because the plane was directed in our direction (although without any threat), which is very rare.
The advantage of having the jet pointing towards the Earth is that in this way its brightness becomes much more intense, which allows it to be observed at different wavelengths and better calculate the distance to it. This led the team to calculate that the black hole was feeding when the universe was only a third of its current age, about 4 billion years old.
To get this result, the team needed to collect data from 21 different telescopes and compare the information to theoretical models of several types of known extreme events, such as stellar collapses and kilonova explosions.
The only scenario that explained the findings was a phenomenon called “tidal disruption,” where a black hole devours a star, stretching it like chewing gum. Other events from tidal disturbances have been observed beforebut this happened much closer to us and without jets directed in our direction.
Astronomers are constantly looking for these extreme events to better understand how these jets form, how they get so much energy, and why so little tidal disruption forms them. This is the first time an event of this type has been detected using visible light, so astronomers should invest even more in instruments like the ZTF.
This study was published in the journal Nature.
Source: THIS IS
