We're Getting a Rare Front Row View of a Black Hole Ripping a Star Apart
And it's ejecting a beam of light almost directly toward us
Hiya!
A black hole shooting a laser beam in Earth’s direction sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Yet that’s precisely what’s happening in real life. I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised, considering everything else happening over the last few years. Thankfully, at least, it isn’t posing any threat, but it is setting some new records.
The Jist
It all started on a mountaintop in California when astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) were forced to shut down a super-fancy astronomical camera because it glitched for several days. Then, by a stroke of luck or fate or mere coincidence, the night the astronomers decided to turn the camera back on, they just happened to spot a spectacular blast of energy and light never seen before.
This discovery spurred the ZTF astronomers to work day and night and through the weekends until the camera was fixed — and when they finally got it working again, the light was still there.
A team of ZTF astronomers led by Igor Andreoni, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, and Michael Coughlin, an astronomer at the University of Minnesota, found that light is actually a massively powerful energy beam (like a laser) likely created by the destruction of a star as its being devoured by a black hole billions of light-years away.
The Details
The fact that a black hole rips apart stars that venture too close to its event horizon surprises no one. In fact, phenomena such as this have a name — total disruption event (TDE). But the blast, AT2022cmc, differed in a couple of ways from any TDE observed by astronomers anywhere before.
Andreoni and Coughlin published their findings, in the journal Nature, on November 30, 2022, announcing AT2022cmc marks the first time astronomers have seen a TDE using visible light — which they only saw because the jet is pointed in our direction — rather than x-rays or gamma rays, which experts detected before.
Their discovery may or may not relate to another study published the same day in Nature Astronomy by astrophysicist Dheeraj Pasham and his team of researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pasham and his team showed that the AT2022cmc blast set a new record for the furthest astronomers have seen a TDE travel.
When the astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) heard about the light, they quickly turned their scope toward it and saw that the light emanating from AT2022cmc began “its journey when the universe was about one-third of its current age.”
Perspective Shift
While we still have no idea what happens beyond a black hole’s event horizon, we are learning quite a bit recently about its external workings. I’ve written a few articles about discoveries related to black holes — including their filaments, the black hole paradox, dormant black holes, and possible links between black holes and entanglement.
Plus, I recently wrote about a new theory of what might create the gravitational field of a black hole — a solution that could entirely alter our understanding of gravity. And now we have the discovery we discussed today to add to our growing pile of knowledge. Just imagine what we’ll learn next.
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