21 telescopes around the world are focusing on the farthest and strangest known black hole, where energy streams from the realm of the dead are shooting towards Earth.
According to The Independent, at the location where the “monster” resides, a tidal disruption event (TDE) has occurred. Only 1% of TDEs lead to a phenomenon of plasma jet and radiation spewing back into space from both sides of the black hole.
This time, one of those two deadly energy streams – leftover food from the black hole’s stellar feast – is heading straight towards Earth.
Image depicting the monster black hole spewing “leftover food” straight at us – (Photo: SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY).
“We have only seen a few jet TDEs, and they are still very strange events that are not well understood,” said Nial Tanvir, an astronomer from the University of Leicester (UK) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a member of the international research team, as reported by Space.
The discovery of this TDE, named AT2022cmc, occurred in February when the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescope located in California issued an alert about an unusual visible light source.
Immediately, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of ESO in the Atacama Desert of Chile swung into action to investigate. Ultimately, up to 21 telescopes were “mobilized” to understand the nature of the event.
The result was the detection of the aforementioned monster black hole and its behavior. Remarkably, this occurred when the universe was only 1/3 the age of its current 13.8 billion years. Thus, the jet stream carrying the “leftover food” from the black hole has taken over 9 billion years to reach us.
This black hole is estimated to consume a mass of more than half the Sun each year, and the signal is still very bright, indicating that the jet from its meal is enormous and continues to blow towards Earth.
Scientists are continuing to monitor this unique monster black hole as well as search for its companions, which could provide insights into the violent phenomena that existed when the universe was still young.
The findings were recently described in two research papers published in Nature on November 30.
