Earlier this year, while watching data from the Zwicky Transient Mechanism, an all-sky survey at Palomar Observatory in California, they noticed an extraordinary glow in a part of the sky where no such light is seen at night. before. According to rough calculations, the flash emitted more than 1000 trillion suns.

A team led by researchers from NASA, Caltech, and elsewhere published its discovery in the Astronomical Bulletin, where the signal caught the attention of astronomers around the world, including scientists at MIT. Over the next few days, several telescopes focused on the signal to gather more data at different wavelengths in the X-ray, ultraviolet, optical and radio bands to see what could produce such an enormous amount of light.

Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with their collaborators, have identified the possible source of the signal. in a published study Nature Astronomy , scientists report that the signal, dubbed AT 2022cmc, originates from a jet of relativistic matter, likely ejected from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly begins to devour a nearby star, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process.

Astronomers have observed other similar “tidal disruption events,” or TDEs, in which a passing star is torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces. The AT 2022cmc is brighter than any TDE detected to date. The source is also about 8.5 billion light-years away, making it the most distant TDE ever detected, with more than half the Universe.

How could such a distant event appear so bright in our sky? The team says the black hole’s jet could be directed directly at Earth, making the signal brighter if the jet were directed in any other direction. The effect is “Doppler gain” and is similar to the amplified sound of a passing siren.

The AT 2022cmc is the fourth Doppler-assisted TDE recorded and the first of its kind to be observed since 2011. It is also the first TDE detected using an optical survey of the sky. As more powerful telescopes become operational in the coming years, they will detect more TDEs that could shed light on how supermassive black holes grow and form galaxies around them.