“Then we looked at it with an X-ray telescope, and what we found was, the source was too bright.” “Things looked pretty normal the first three days,” Pasham recalls. Lucchini’s MIT co-authors include first author and Research Scientist Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham, postdoc Peter Kosec, Assistant Professor Erin Kara, and Principal Research Scientist Ronald Remillard, along with collaborators at universities and institutions around the world.įollowing AT 2022cmc’s initial discovery, Pasham and Lucchini focused in on the signal using the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), an X-ray telescope that operates aboard the International Space Station. So, sources like a TDE can actually be a really good probe for how that process happens.” “That tells us they feed very fast, though we don’t know how that feeding process works. “We know there is one supermassive black hole per galaxy, and they formed very quickly in the universe’s first million years,” says co-author Matteo Lucchini, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. It is also the first TDE discovered using an optical sky survey.Īs more powerful telescopes start up in the coming years, they will reveal more TDEs, which can shed light on how supermassive black holes grow and shape the galaxies around them. The effect is “Doppler boosting” and is similar to the amped-up sound of a passing siren.ĪT 2022cmc is the fourth Doppler-boosted TDE ever detected and the first such event that has been observed since 2011. How could such a distant event appear so bright in our sky? The team says the black hole’s jet may be pointing directly toward Earth, making the signal appear brighter than if the jet were pointing in any other direction. The source is also the farthest TDE ever detected, at some 8.5 billion light years away - more than halfway across the universe. AT 2022cmc is brighter than any TDE discovered to date. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.Īstronomers have observed other such “tidal disruption events,” or TDEs, in which a passing star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces. In a study appearing today in Nature Astronomy, the scientists report that the signal, named AT 2022cmc, likely comes from a relativistic jet of matter streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. Now, the MIT astronomers along with their collaborators have determined a likely source for the signal. Over the next few days, multiple telescopes focused in on the signal to gather more data across multiple wavelengths in the X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, and radio bands, to see what could possibly produce such an enormous amount of light. The team, led by researchers at NASA, Caltech, and elsewhere, posted their discovery to an astronomy newsletter, where the signal drew the attention of astronomers around the world, including scientists at MIT. From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns. Earlier this year, astronomers were keeping tabs on data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, an all-sky survey based at the Palomar Observatory in California, when they detected an extraordinary flash in a part of the sky where no such light had been observed the night before.
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