Black hole swallows star in brightest phenomenon ever seen  

In the ancient universe

An extremely bright glow appeared in the night sky in February and was the result of a star coming very close to a supermassive black hole with 500 million times the mass of our Sun. The impressive thing is that this event happened at a distance of 8.5 billion light years from Earth, when the universe was 1/3 of its current age, creating more questions than answers. The bright burst, also known as AT 2022cmc, was detected by the Palomar Observatory in California on February 11.

When a star is swallowed by a black hole, it releases an enormous amount of energy and sends a jet of material into space at nearly the speed of light. Scientists believe that AT 2022cmc appeared so bright because this jet was headed directly toward Earth, creating the Doppler enhancement effect.

Gamma rays are the usual suspects in such events. However, however bright they are, the light a collapsing star can produce is limited. Because AT 2022cmc was so bright and lasted so long, we knew that something truly colossal must be powering it – a giant black hole. – Dr. Benjamin Gompertz, University of Birmingham

The researchers found that AT 2022cmc was 100 times more powerful than the brightest gamma-ray burst in history. As for the star, it completely disintegrated and its pieces went into orbit around the black hole, signing their doom.

Just 1% of stars that fall into a black hole end up in jets that travel at nearly the speed of light, spewing plasma and radiation from the poles of a spinning black hole. The last one we detected was a decade ago, and astronomers still don’t understand why only a few such events have this outcome and others don’t. Observing more such events can give us the answers.

Astronomy is changing rapidly. Scientists can use AT 2022cmc as a model of what to look for and find more such occurrences from distant black holes.

The research was published in Nature Astronomy .