07 Dec An incredible jet of light was released as a star split from a supermassive black hole (Τranslation: LECTURES BUREAU)
American and European astronomers have announced that they have made the most distant detection to date of a black hole swallowing a nearby star, some 8.5 billion light-years away, while at the same time it is sending a tremendously bright jet of radiation toward our planet.
This February ground-based telescopes had observed an unusual new powerful light source, outshining more than 1,000 trillion suns. They named it AT2022cmc and spent months trying to figure out where it came from. They now concluded that it was a massive black hole in a distant galaxy which, swallowing a neighboring star, emitted its remains in the form of a jet of radiation which, moving at almost the speed of light, happened to aim directly at Earth and thus it became visible.
Stars orbiting very close to a black hole are destroyed by the tremendous gravitational pulls at its periphery, which releases enormous amounts of energy. Until now very few such extreme and rare cases, called “Tidal Disruption Events (TDE)”, have been observed by astronomers.
The researchers, led by Igor Andreoni (University of Maryland) and Diraj Passam (MIT), who made two relevant publications in the journals “Nature” and “Nature Astronomy”, managed to study the phenomenon with 21 telescopes in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (high energy gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, visible light). The heat developed at the source of the light is estimated to have been around 30,000 degrees Celsius, while the black hole probably “swallows” every year a mass equivalent to half the sun.
Translation based on the Greek text as appeared on www.capital.gr
Editing: LECTURES BUREAU
