Before this year, scientists were surrounding the incident from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a whole survey situated at the Palomar Observatory near California, when they noticed an unusual flash in a region of the horizon where no such light had been spotted the night before. A crude computation showed that the flare emitted greater light than 1,000 trillion suns.
The team, led by experts from NASA, Caltech, and other institutions, announced its discovery in an astronomical newsletter, where it caught the attention of scientists from all across the world, including MIT scientists.
Several telescopes concentrated on the signal over the following several days, gathering more data across different wavelengths within X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, and even radio bands to determine what could potentially create such a vast amount of light, as per NASA.
AT 2022 CMC
The MIT astronomers and their associates have now identified a potential cause for the signal. The signal, AT 2022 cmc, is likely the result of a relativistic jet of material rushing out of a supermassive black hole extremely near the speed of light, according to research published in Nature Astronomy. Scientists presume the jet results from a black hole eating a nearby star and unleashing enormous power in the process.
Other "tidal disruption events," or TDEs, have been detected that occur when a passing star is ripped apart by the tidal pressures of a black hole. AT 2022 cmc is lighter than any TDE found so far. The source is also the most distant TDE yet found, at 8.5 billion light years away - more often than midway across the universe.
What makes such a faraway event look so brilliant in the local sky? According to the researchers, the black hole's jet may be pointed straight towards Earth, rendering the signal look stronger compared to if the jet were directed in any other way. The phenomenon is known as "Doppler boosting," which sounds like an amplified siren.
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Supermassive Blackhole
As described by the paper, the AT 2022 cmc has been the fourth Doppler-boosted TDE yet discovered and the first occurrence during 2011. This is also the earliest TDE detected with the use of an optical sky scan. More TDEs will be discovered when more powerful telescopes come online in the future years, shedding insight into how enormous black holes evolve and influence the galaxies surrounding them.
As per co-author Matteo Lucchini, a postdoc at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, the researchers understand there really is one massive black hole per galaxy, and they emerged extremely swiftly in the universe's first million years. That means they eat incredibly quickly; however, the team isn't sure how that happens.
Among Lucchini's MIT co-authors are first author and Research Scientist Dheeraj "DJ" Pasham, postdoc Peter Kosec, Assistant Professor Erin Kara, and Principal Research Scientist Ronald Remillard, as well as partners from universities and institutions all around the world.
Following the discovery of AT 2022 cmc, Pasham and Lucchini narrowed in on the signal with the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station.
Such brilliant flashes of light are usually gamma-ray bursts, which are strong jets of X-ray radiation emitted by massive stars collapsing. The researchers then compiled data from various X-ray, radio, optical, and ultraviolet telescopes and monitored the signal's behavior over the next two weeks.
Greater Number of TDEs in Future
The signal's extraordinary brightness in the X-ray region was the most astounding attribute they discovered. They discovered that the X-ray radiation from AT 2022 cmc fluctuated by a rate of 500 during a few weeks.
They hypothesized that such strong X-ray activity was caused by an "extreme accretion episode" - an event that forms a massive churning disk, such as a tidal disruption event, where a torn star creates a vortex of material as it descends into a black hole. Indeed, the scientists discovered that the X-ray brightness of AT 2022 cmc was equivalent to, if not greater than, three previously discovered TDEs. These brilliant occurrences resulted in matter jets aimed directly toward Earth.
If AT 2022 cmc's brightness is caused by a comparable Earth-targeting jet, how quickly must the jet be traveling to produce such a brilliant signal? Lucchini modeled the data from the signal, assuming the incident featured an aircraft flying directly toward Earth.
Lucchini said that the jet speed is 99.99 percent that of light. To generate such a powerful jet, the black hole needs to be active, which Pasham refers to as a "hyper-feeding frenzy." Pasham thinks that it is devouring the star at a pace of half the sun's total mass every year.
Much of this tidal disturbance occurs early on, and scientists captured it right at the start, between one week of the black hole beginning to feast on the star. They anticipate seeing a much greater number of these TDEs in the coming future, says Lucchini. Then we might finally be able to explain how black holes unleash these tremendously strong jets.
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