Africa-Press – Rwanda. Despite a lack of firm proof, theoretical physicists have posited that black holes may deposit matter it’s sucked up into a different place via a “wormhole,” which might even enable time travel. However, a wormhole has never been observed before.
In a study published in Nature Astronomy on Wednesday, a group of astronomers revealed that a mysterious bright flash observed earlier this year in several telescopes across the planet most likely came from the business end of an ultra-massive black hole called a blazar.
In response, scientists from around the globe trained their equipment on the mysterious and powerful new light source in an attempt to deduce its properties.
Their explanation? It was a supermassive black hole eating a star.
The black hole, designated AT 2022cmc, is about 8.5 billion light-years away, but became visible because of what astronomers call a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), when a star is torn apart by the incredible tidal gravitational forces in and around a black hole.
Supermassive black holes often anchor the centers of galaxies, including our own, and the most powerful ones shoot out jets of ionized matter at speeds close to that of light. Astronomers have termed them “blazars,” and when that jet is pointed at the Earth, it looks like one of the brightest objects in the universe.
“That tells us they feed very fast, though we don’t know how that feeding process works. So, sources like a TDE can actually be a really good probe for how that process happens,” he noted.
To produce such an intense jet, the black hole must be in an extremely active phase — what co-author Research Scientist Dheeraj Pasham describes as a “hyper-feeding frenzy.”
“We expect many more of these TDEs in the future,” Lucchini noted. “Then we might be able to say, finally, how exactly black holes launch these extremely powerful jets.”
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