Americans and Europeans astronomers announced that they have made the furthest to date black hole detection which “swallows” the nearest star, located at a distance of about 8.5 billion light years, and at the same time sends an extremely bright jet of radiation to our planet.

In February this year, ground-based telescopes observed an unusual new powerful light source that outshines more than 1,000 trillion suns. They named it AT2022cmc and spent months trying to figure out where it came from. Now they have come to the conclusion that it was a massive black hole in a distant galaxy, which, having swallowed a nearby star, emitted its remnants in the form of a jet of radiation, which, moving at almost the speed of light, aimed directly at the Earth and thus became visible. .

Stars orbiting very close to the black hole are destroyed by the huge gravitational pull at its periphery, which releases a huge amount of energy. To date, astronomers have observed very few of these extreme and rare events, called “tidal disruption events” (TDEs).

Researchers led by Igor Andreoni (University of Maryland) and Dheeraj Passam (MIT), who made two related publications in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy, were able to study the phenomenon using 21 telescopes in different areas of the electromagnetic field. spectrum (high energy gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, visible light). The heat given off by the light source is estimated to be around 30,000 degrees Celsius, while the black hole likely “swallows” a mass equivalent to half the Sun each year.

^{According to APE – MEB}