"It's probably swallowing the star at the rate of half the mass of the sun per year," Pasham said in a statement. As study co-author from MIT, Dheeraj "DJ" Pasham puts it, the jet is extremely active and in a "hyper-feeding frenzy." To that end, the researchers believe it shows up as unnaturally bright from our vantage point on Earth because of two reasons.įirst, the jet's black hole dwelling is likely to be devouring a nearby star, thereby releasing a substantial amount of energy and emitting a ton of light during its feast. "We found that the jet speed is 99.99% the speed of light," Matteo Lucchini, a researcher at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and co-author of the study published in Nature Astronomy, said in a statement. In other words, the team behind these studies thinks the flash came from a jet of matter spilling from a supermassive black hole's insides, traveling at supersonic speeds and pointed directly toward our planet. And a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy conclude that Zwicky picked up the signal of a uniquely extreme "tidal disruption event," or TDE. Since this glint's spectacular discovery, scientists worldwide began trying to decode where, why and even how the dazzling event could have occurred. The human mind can barely comprehend such a quantity, let alone such a quantity of… suns. Emanating from about 8.5 billion light-years away, it appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns combined. Though such flashes aren't exactly a new thing for scientists - astronomers have seen loads of these glimmers burst forth from deep space before - this particular one existed in a league of its own. The vivid flare, later named AT 2022cmc, sparked endless questions. Back in February, astronomers with the Zwicky Transient Facility in California spotted a brilliant flash of light. The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. "It is an interesting object because it is quite a large galaxy at a very large distance from Earth, where the majority of the galaxies are smaller," said IAC astronomer Ignacio Trujillo. It is unlikely this conclusion will dilute interest in the object, however. The relationship between the mass of what the team assumed to be a flat galaxy and the maximum velocity of its rotation convinced the team that the supposed "tail of stars" is actually a galaxy behaving like a galaxy. "So we decided to compare a much closer galaxy and found that they are extraordinarily similar." "When we analyzed the velocities of this distant structure of stars, we realized that they were very similar to those obtained from the rotation of galaxies," said fellow IAC researcher and team member Mireia Montes. Fastest-growing black hole ever seen is devouring the equivalent of 1 Earth per second Black holes: Everything you need to know The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time! The observations of the two different objects - the supposed runaway black hole's tail and IC5249 - were in surprising agreement. Located near our own Milky Way, this thin galaxy has a mass in stars similar to the "tail" that Hubble observed. To vet their interpretation of the Hubble observations, the team compared the supposed tail of stars to a well-studied bulge-less galaxy called IC5249. In one sense it is also a pity, because the existence of fleeing black holes is expected, and this could have been the first one to be observed." "The new proposed scenario is much simpler. "It's a relief to have found the solution to this mystery," Sanchez Almeida added. "The motions, the size and the quantity of stars fit what has been seen in galaxies within the local universe," team member and IAC researcher Jorge Sanchez Almeida said in a statement. Such thin or flat disk galaxies are actually fairly common in the universe. Now, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) have suggested that the intriguing observation could actually be a galaxy without a bulge seen edge-on. These troubling factors cast some doubt on the "runaway black hole followed by stars" scenario, and multiple teams of astronomers began exploring different, less exotic explanations for the observations.
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