Although astronomers have witnessed many of these glimmers emerge from outer space, such flashes aren’t really a novel phenomenon for scientists. However, this particular one stood out from the rest.
It looked to emit more light than 1,000 trillion suns combined from a distance of about 8.5 billion light-years. Even without considering the number of suns, the human mind finds it difficult to fathom such an amount.
Since the astounding finding of this glimmer, researchers from all around the world have been attempting to determine how, why, and where the brilliant event may have taken place.
And two publications that were released on Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy come to the conclusion that Zwicky detected the signal of an exceptionally extreme “tidal disruption event,” or TDE.
To put it another way, the research team believes that the flare was caused by a jet of matter that was ejecting from the centre of a supermassive black hole and was directed at Earth.
We discovered that the jet speed is 99.99% the speed of light, according to Matteo Lucchini, co-author of the study published in Nature Astronomy and researcher at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
John Wheeler, a pioneer in the study of black holes, described the TDE-jet combination as “a tube of toothpaste squeezed tight about its middle,” causing it to “spray matter out of both ends” in 1971. These ultrafast or relativistic plasma and radiation jets that shoot from both of a TDE’s poles are produced by only around 1% of TDEs.
If the team’s assessment of the jet’s existence is accurate, it would be the furthest tidal disruption event ever recorded. But its brilliance is what really stands out about it. This is due to the fact that information can be extracted from an object more easily the brighter it is.
The jet was observed by a total of 21 telescopes worldwide using a variety of light sources, ranging from radio waves to high-energy gamma rays. The data from all of these observations were then matched with data from observed cosmic phenomena, such as neutron stars and kilonovae, but only one scenario yielded a reliable match: a jetting TDE heading directly at us.
To that end, the scientists think it appears as being unusually bright from our vantage point on Earth for two reasons.First, the jet’s black hole home is probably consuming a nearby star, releasing a significant quantity of energy and producing a tremendous amount of light in the process. The jet is incredibly busy and in a “hyper-feeding frenzy,” as MIT research co-author Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham puts it.
Pasham stated in a statement that the star is likely being swallowed at a pace of half the mass of the sun every year. The majority of this tidal disruption occurs in the early stages, and we were able to observe this event just one week after the black hole began consuming the star.
However, second, and in our opinion most fascinating, is because of an effect known as “Doppler boosting.”Doppler boosting refers to what?The Doppler effect basically describes how waves of all kinds, including sound, light, and any other kind, alter as they move closer to or farther away from you.
Imagine what might happen if a car were to pass your house while playing loud music. Not only does the sound become less audible as it moves further away, but it frequently changes in pitch as well. This is as a result of the sound waves appearing to kind of spread out, which causes your brain to perceive them as being at a lower pitch.
When astronomers discuss distant stars and bright galaxies, they frequently use the term “redshift” to allude to the Doppler effect that also affects light waves.The light waves that those objects produce spread out as they get further away, changing from compact bluer waves to relaxed redder ones.
The James Webb Space Telescope from NASA is a huge deal because eventually they even venture into infrared territory, which is undetectable to human vision and conventional optical equipment. The extremely spread out wavelengths found in the vast, black universe can be captured by it.
However, the relativistic jet of AT 2022cmc is travelling in our direction, not away from us, therefore there is no fading or reddening of the light. It is becoming more and more luminous as its photons approach our telescopes, and its acceleration to virtually the speed of light adds to the brightness.
Giorgos Leloudas, a co-author of the Nature paper and an astronomer at DTU Space in Denmark, stated that because the relativistic jet is aimed at us, it makes the event much brighter than it would otherwise look and observable over a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
These kinds of unusually brilliant bursts of light typically result from phenomena called gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts are likewise stunning jets, but they are comprised of X-ray emissions emitted as the stellar bodies of large stars collapse.
These phenomena frequently appear in the astronomy hall of fame because of their shimmering nature. In fact, a potent gamma-ray burst that originated from the universe’s far reaches last month left scientists in a state of shock. Its name literally means “the brightest of all time.”
However, additional speculation revealed that AT 2022cmc was unquestionably not a gamma-ray burst.The strongest gamma-ray burst afterglow was 100 times weaker than this particular event, according to Pasham. It was truly extraordinary.
The team came to the surprising conclusion that AT 2022cmc must originate from a black hole’s magnetic whirlpool of debris after weeks of data mining and exhausting all astronomical observation options with X-ray, radio, optical, and UV observatories.
It must be a tidal disruption event with Doppler pigmentation. If so, it would be the fourth Doppler-boosted TDE to be discovered and the first such event overall since 2011. It is also the first TDE to be discovered by an optical sky survey.
The temperature and distance of AT 2022cmc were also determined by scientists using the full range of observations.According to Matt Nicholl, associate professor at the University of Birmingham, “our spectrum told us that the source was hot: over 30,000 degrees, which is normal for a TDE.”
“We did, however, observe some light being absorbed by the galaxy where this event took place. This galaxy was much farther away than we had anticipated, as shown by the strong shift of these absorption lines towards redder wavelengths.”
Surprisingly, the source galaxy may become visible to the James Webb Telescope after AT 2022cmc’s brightness finally declines, blocking off the centre of this distant galaxy, which is why it is not currently visible.
Researchers will keep searching the sky for the mysterious and poorly understood jetting TDE in the meanwhile.In the future, Lucchini predicted, “we foresee many more of these TDEs.” Then we might finally be able to explain how black holes create these incredibly strong jets.