Record-Breaking Black Hole Flare: Supermassive Cosmic Beast Devours Massive Star 11 Billion Light-Years Away

Supermassive black holes exist within a surrounding disk of gas and dust that gets drawn inward by their immense gravitational pull.

Washington:

Astronomers have detected the most powerful flare ever recorded from a supermassive black hole, apparently triggered when this cosmic entity completely destroyed and consumed a massive star that ventured too near its gravitational field.

Researchers report that at its maximum intensity, the flare shone with a brightness 10 trillion times that of our sun. The source is a black hole approximately 300 million times more massive than the sun, situated in a distant galaxy about 11 billion light-years from Earth. For reference, a light-year measures the distance light travels in a year—approximately 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Black holes represent extraordinarily dense cosmic objects with such powerful gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape once past their event horizon. Most galaxies are believed to harbor one at their core. The particular black hole in this study is exceptionally massive—substantially larger than the one at the Milky Way's center, which contains roughly 4 million solar masses.

According to the research team, the most plausible explanation for this unprecedented flare involves a large star being captured by the black hole's gravity. As material from the doomed star plunges inward, it generates an intense energy burst when reaching the black hole's point of no return.

Scientists believe the consumed star had a mass between 30 and possibly 200 times that of our sun. It likely belonged to a stellar population orbiting in the black hole's vicinity and somehow was pushed too close through an interaction with another celestial body in the area.

"It seems reasonable that it was involved in a collision with another more massive body in its original orbit around the supermassive black hole which essentially knocked it in," explained Caltech astronomer Matthew Graham, the lead author of the research published in Nature Astronomy.

"It was put on a much more elliptical orbit, which brought it much closer to the supermassive black hole at its closest pass—too close, it turns out," Graham added.

Supermassive black holes are encircled by disks of gas and dust that get gradually pulled inward after being captured by their gravitational influence.

"However it happened, the star wandered close enough to the supermassive black hole that it was 'spaghettified'—that is, stretched out to become long and thin, due to the gravity of the supermassive black hole strengthening as you get very close to it. That material then spiraled around the supermassive black hole as it fell in," described astronomer and study co-author K.E. Saavik Ford of City University of New York Borough of Manhattan Community College and Graduate Center.

The observed flare results from the gases of the shredded star heating up and emitting radiation as they fall toward the event horizon.

The star involved in this cosmic catastrophe was unusually massive.

"Stars this massive are spectacularly rare both because smaller stars are born more often than massive ones, and because very massive stars live very short lives," Ford noted.

The researchers hypothesize that stars orbiting near supermassive black holes can grow larger by accreting some of the material circling around the black hole, causing them to become abnormally massive.

The team observed the flare using telescopes in California, Arizona and Hawaii. They examined alternative explanations such as a supernova, a black hole jet, or gravitational lensing that might have magnified a less powerful event. None of these scenarios matched the observational data.

Due to the vast distance light must travel across space, astronomers studying distant events like this are effectively looking back through time to earlier periods in the universe's history.

The flare increased in brightness by a factor of 40 during the observation period, apparently as more stellar material fell into the black hole, reaching peak luminosity in June 2018. It proved to be 30 times brighter than any previously documented black hole flare. Though still ongoing, the flare is gradually diminishing in intensity, with the entire phenomenon expected to last approximately 11 years.

"The flare is still fading," Graham confirmed.