Astronomers spot record-breaking flare from supermassive black hole

Astronomers have observed the largest and most distant flare ever detected from a supermassive black hole — a cosmic event so powerful it shone with the brightness of 10 trillion suns.

Nicknamed “Superman,” the flare originated 10 billion light-years from Earth in an active galactic nucleus (AGN), a bright region at a galaxy’s center powered by a supermassive black hole feeding on surrounding material, CNN writes. 

The outburst, described in Nature Astronomy, was led by Matthew Graham, a research professor at Caltech.

“About 1 in 10,000 AGN show some sort of flaring activity but this is so extreme that it puts it into its own category [which is roughly a 1 in a million event],” Graham said.

First detected in 2018 by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey and the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory, the flare initially appeared unremarkable.

Years later, data revealed it was far brighter than expected. Follow-up observations with the W. M. Keck Observatory confirmed the source was an AGN harboring a black hole 500 million times the mass of the Sun.

Researchers determined the flare was likely a tidal disruption event — when a star ventures too close to a black hole and is torn apart. The consumed star is estimated to be at least 30 times the Sun’s mass, making it “probably the most massive star ever seen shredded by a supermassive black hole,” said K.E. Saavik Ford, a study coauthor at the American Museum of Natural History.

The flare remains ongoing.

“It’s like a fish only halfway down the whale’s gullet,” Graham noted. At its peak, Superman was 30 times more luminous than any previously known black hole flare, surpassing the 2020 event nicknamed “Scary Barbie.”

Because the light took 10 billion years to reach Earth, astronomers are observing an event that unfolded when the universe was young. Due to cosmological time dilation,

“Seven years here is two years there. We are watching the event play back at quarter speed,” Graham explained.

Future surveys using instruments such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory may uncover more of these rare cosmic feasts.

“Understanding the stars in the centers of galaxies ... gives us a new way of investigating galaxy assembly over all,” Ford said.

Astrophysicist Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University called the discovery “a newly emerging class of extreme nuclear transients (ENTs) ... challenging our current models of how black holes and stars interact.”

“When a supermassive black hole suddenly erupts in a brilliant flare, it gives astronomers a front-row seat to some of the most extreme physics in the Universe,” added Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley. “By catching this record-breaking brightening, astronomers have opened a new window into the extreme physics of galactic centers.”

By Sabina Mammadli