""It grabbed our attention because it looked bright, but we didn't know what it was at first," Matthew Graham, an astronomy professor at Caltech and first author of the new study that documented the observation, told SFGATE. Graham and his co-authors said the flare was likely caused by the black hole shredding a nearby star into bits and pieces in a so-called tidal disruption event. The team published their find, first observed in 2018 at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy."
""The researchers reported that this flare was both the brightest and the most distant ever detected. At its peak, the flare was 30 times more luminous than any other recorded from a supermassive black hole. The black hole that spawned the flare is 10 billion light-years away. "We thought it was in the ballpark of 4 billion light-years away, but it turned out to be much farther," Graham said. "We knew it was bright but that meant it was in the next category.""
A flare emitting light equal to ten trillion suns originated from a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. First detected at Palomar Observatory in 2018, the event reached peak luminosity 30 times greater than any previously recorded from such a black hole. The phenomenon likely resulted from a tidal disruption event in which a roughly 30-solar-mass star was torn apart by a black hole about 500 million times the sun's mass. The observation is both the brightest and most distant flare documented and challenges prior expectations about black hole activity.
Read at SFGATE
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