A jet of stellar leftovers spewing towards Earth led astronomers to this black hole ⬇️
"Things looked pretty normal the first three days," Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was first author on one of the studies, said in a"Then we looked at it with an X-ray telescope, and what we found was, the source was too bright," he said of the NICER observations, noting that the signal remained 100 times more powerful than the afterglow from any gamma-ray burst seen to date."It was something extraordinary.
An artist's impression of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and blasting out jets of stellar material. Around the globe, a total of 21 telescopes observed AT2022cmc in various wavelengths of light, from high-energy gamma-rays to low-energy radio waves. Then, astronomers could compare this data to observations of other violent events, like collapsing stars and the powerful cosmic explosions called kilonovas.
The only scenario that matched the light profile recorded by these telescopes was the rare case when a TDE jet — containing matter moving at 99.99% the"Because the relativistic jet is pointing at us, it makes the event much brighter than it would otherwise appear, and visible over a broader span of the electromagnetic spectrum," Giorgos Leloudas, an astronomer at DTU Space in Denmark and co-author on the new research, said in the ESO statement.
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