instal the new Black Hole Battle - Eat All

Almost the speed of lightĪnother team focused on the very bright X-ray counterpart, and estimated that the jet was launched at more than 95% of the speed of light. It may be the only way to identify and study otherwise dormant supermassive black holes in the early universe,” says Jesper Sollerman. The fact that it was observed in the optical regime enabled the discovery at a very large distance. “It has been more than 10 years since a similar event was found previously, and this is the first time it has been discovered in the optical regime. They estimate that relativistic jets are launched in only 1% of such destructive events, making AT2022cmc an extremely rare occurrence. The discovery team from ZTF, led by Andreoni and Coughlin, have published their result in Nature. Both teams conclude that the flash is the result of a star being torn apart by a spinning supermassive black hole, launching jets pointing in the direction of the Earth.

Now two teams of astronomers, both of which include researchers at Stockholm University, have simultaneously published their independent analyses of the distant flash. A spectrum revealed that it was in fact very distant: the light from AT2022cmc had been traveling towards Earth for the past 8 billion years. The discovery caused several groups of astronomers to point all kinds of telescopes towards the new transient, dubbed AT2022cmc. ZTF finds dozens of exploding stars each night, but the new object changed in brightness too fast to be a regular supernova. On February 11 2022, a team of astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California discovered an unusual optical flare. It looked neither like a supernova nor like more exotic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts or kilonovae, so we concluded that it had to be a black hole tearing a star apart in an unusual way,” says Jesper Sollerman, professor at the Department of Astronomy and co-author of the article in Nature. “We had to exclude all other possible explanations to understand what we were looking at.

Instal the new Black Hole Battle - Eat All