(ORDO NEWS) — The source of bright radiation in many ranges, codenamed AT 2022cmc, is a supermassive black hole. This was reported by the press service of the University of Birmingham.
The AT 2022cmc signal was recorded by astronomers in early 2022. It is noticeable in the X-ray, optical and radio ranges, and is characterized by high brightness.
Because of it, astronomers could not immediately unambiguously classify the object.
Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Birmingham have concluded that they are observing a tidal disruption event, which is what astronomers call the process in which a black hole tears a star apart and spaghettifies it.
AT 2022cmc is anomalously bright for this type of event, and is located 8.5 billion light-years from Earth – the most distant known source of this kind.
The nature of this object was confirmed by observations with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile, operating in the optical range.
The spectrometer showed that the temperature of the radiating gas exceeded 30 thousand degrees – this is a lot, but typical of tidal disruption events.
The increased brightness is achieved not due to temperature, but due to the fact that the jet of matter is directed directly at the Earth.
Due to the “Doppler enhancement” there is an increase in the brightness of the radiation.
In addition, since AT 2022cmc glows very brightly and for a long time, scientists suggest that it is generated by a supermassive black hole, which absorbs the mass of a star every year, equal to 0.5 solar.
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