Scientists have determined that a burst of visible light that was directed at Earth directly came from a black hole.
A remarkable discovery
No, this is not a scene from a science fiction movie. It was a thrilling finding since it was the first time that a black hole had used light, and it came from an area of space where no light had ever been seen before.
These results have been published in two scholarly journals: one is Nature, where the article is titled “A very luminous jet from the disruption of a star by a massive black hole,” and the other is Nature Astronomy, where the article is titled “The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole.”
According to reports, light is equivalent to a trillion suns. Fair to say, it’s quite stunning.
When a star approached a black hole too closely, it was ripped apart, and the resulting explosion was visible throughout the cosmos.
A tidal disruption event is what this incident is called (TDE). One percent of the time, the black hole’s two sides emit radiation and plasma.
It is thought that the light that reached Earth began its trip when the cosmos was only one-third the age it is now.
The fact that this TDE was so bright was remarkable, particularly because it was pointed at the Earth. This indicated that the experience was more intense.
The TDE occurred in February as researchers pointed some of the most sophisticated telescopes in the world toward the source.
Astronomers are trying to study this most recent activity in order to understand more about TDES and comprehend them.
After a supermassive black hole literally “burped up” a star that it had “eaten” three years prior, astronomers were left perplexed last month.
When a tiny star in a galaxy 665 million light years from Earth accidentally approached a black hole in 2018, scientists saw it shatter into a million pieces. At the time, this was not unusual.
However, in June 2021, the same black hole surprised astronomers by spitting out stellar matter, taking them “completely by surprise.”
Experts found this to be particularly odd considering that the black hole hadn’t consumed anything new since its feast in 2018.
