Record-breaking black hole flare traced to massive star’s destruction

ANKARA

The most luminous flare ever observed from a black hole was likely caused by the violent destruction of a massive star, reports said on Tuesday.

The event, first spotted in 2018, reached a brightness more than 10 trillion times greater than the Sun, according to the journal Nature Astronomy.

“It didn’t seem nearly as interesting as we thought it was,” said Matthew Graham, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. But even five years later, the flare remained unusually bright, prompting closer investigation using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The flare’s source was determined to be 10 billion light-years away (approximately 59 quadrillion miles or 95 quadrillion kilometers), meaning the jets of light had to be extraordinarily luminous to be seen from Earth.

Astronomers concluded that the outburst was 30 times more luminous than any previously recorded black hole flare.

Their leading theory is that a supermassive black hole devoured a star at least 30 times the mass of the Sun.

As the star was torn apart, jets of light erupted at intensities 40 times brighter than normal.

“This black hole is so distant from the Solar System that it takes about seven Earth years to witness just two years of the black hole’s activity,” Graham said. “It’ll be a very long game.”

Joseph Michail, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the flare could become “a normal event” as more powerful sky surveys come online.

Researchers continue to monitor the object for further outbursts, hoping to learn more about black holes and the extreme physics surrounding them.