Black Hole Flare Shines With the Light of 10 Trillion Suns, Scientists Say
It's tough for us to really grasp the scale of truly massive numbers. I mean, even imagining a million or a billion is hard enough, right? But get ready to think even bigger because scientists have spotted the biggest and most distant black hole flare ever recorded, and the figures involved are mind-blowing.
This incredible event took place at what's called an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which is basically a black hole that's actively gobbling up matter. Now, this isn't just any black hole; researchers believe it's 500 million times more massive than our Sun and located a staggering 10 billion light-years away. That's so far that it almost sounds unreal!
The scientists think that this flare was caused by a tidal disruption event. Imagine a star wandering a little too close to the black hole. The immense gravity of the AGN could have pulled the star in and basically devoured it. They're estimating the star was about 30 times the mass of our Sun. To put that in perspective, imagine 30 suns being swallowed by a supermassive black hole.
According to a post from Caltech, when this flare was at its brightest, it shined with the light of 10 trillion suns. Can you even imagine that kind of brightness? That's an insane amount of energy being released all at once! It's definitely not something you'd want to be anywhere near.
Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at Caltech, mentioned that this AGN is unlike any other they've ever seen. The Zwicky Transient Facility, along with the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, first spotted this black hole back in 2018. The study about the AGN and its crazy flare was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Source: Engadget