Scientists have detected the brightest flare ever recorded from a supermassive black hole — an enormous cosmic explosion that blazed with the light of 10 trillion suns.
Such flares are believed to result from tangled magnetic fields or disturbances in the superheated gas disks that surround black holes. They help scientists better understand how these colossal cosmic objects behave and interact with their surroundings.
The extraordinary flare was first observed in 2018 by a camera at California’s Palomar Observatory. It took about three months to reach its peak brightness before slowly fading over the following years. Researchers say the flare was likely triggered when a massive star strayed too close to the black hole and was ripped apart by its immense gravitational force.
“At first, we didn’t really believe the numbers about the energy,” said Matthew Graham of the California Institute of Technology, which operates the Palomar Observatory.
The findings, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy, show that the flare originated from a supermassive black hole roughly 10 billion light years away — the most distant and luminous one ever observed, dating back to a time when the universe was still young.
Almost every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Yet, scientists remain uncertain about how these gigantic entities formed.
According to Joseph Michail of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the research, the discovery will help astronomers “probe how supermassive black holes interacted with their environments early in the universe” — interactions that played a vital role in shaping the cosmos we inhabit today.
