MIT: Bright black hole jet can ‘be a really good probe’ into formation and growth of supermassive black holes

A mysterious flash of light that appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns, two years ago, is providing astronomers with insight into how supermassive black holes feed and grow.

MIT News reports the signal, named AT 2022cmc, was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California and was likely caused by a black hole jet pointing directly at Earth. It is the brightest and farthest “tidal disruption event”, or TDE, to be detected in which a passing star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces.

“We know there is one supermassive black hole per galaxy, and they formed very quickly in the universe’s first million years,” co-author Matteo Lucchini, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said, according to MIT News. “That tells us they feed very fast, though we don’t know how that feeding process works. So, sources like a TDE can actually be a really good probe for how that process happens.”

MIT scientists, whose research was published in Nature Astronomy, believe the brightness of the signal was due to the direction of the black hole jet with the effect being “Doppler boosting”, which is like the increased sound of a passing siren.

“This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow,” first author and research scientist Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham said, according to MIT News. “It was something extraordinary.”

The signal was the fourth Doppler-boosted TDE ever detected and the first TDE discovered using an optical sky survey, according to MIT News. The TDE was located more than halfway across the universe at 8.5 billion light years away.

MIT News reports the signal drew the attention of astronomers around the world who focused in on the signal using telescopes across a variety of wavelengths from X-ray to radio bands.