A STAR-DESTROYING black hole is releasing a jet that’s so high-energy it’s one of the “brightest things ever detected in the universe”.
Experts say that the black hole is even more powerful than the Death Star – the fictional Star Wars spacecraft used to destroy planets.
The bizarrely nicknamed ‘Jetty McJetface’ – or officially, AT2018hyz – is around 665 million lightyears from Earth.
It originates from a supermassive black hole that scientists say has a “case of cosmic indigestion”.
And that’s left it burping out the remains of a shredded star that it destroyed four years ago.
Now astronomers at the University of Oregon say that it’s not only “still going strong”, the jet appears to be ramping up.
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“Already, the jet shooting out of the black hole is a contender for one of the brightest, most energetic things ever detected in the universe,” said Laurel Hamers, of the University of Oregon, describing the work.
Scientists collected enough data on the black hole and its jet to predict how it will get on in the future.
And they say that the stream of radio waves being “belched” from the black hole will keep increasing exponentially.
That’s until a predicted peak that will take place in 2027.
“This is really unusual,” said astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, who led the work at the University of Oregon.
“I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything rising like this over such a long period of time.”
It’s not uncommon for astronomers to spot stars being shredded after getting too close to the black hole.
The stars are torn apart by the black hole’s gravitational field, even if they don’t go all the way across the event horizon, which is the point of no return.
This kind of incident is known as a “tidal disruption event”.
That name isn’t a coincidence – it’s “caused by the same gravitational dynamics that create ocean tides on Earth,” Hamers explained.
But in this case, the gravitational tug shredded the star in a process known as spaghettification.
However, Cendes noted that “a black hole emitting this much energy so many years after chewing up a star is unprecedented”.
The tidal disruption event was spotted by one of Cendes’ lab mates while she was at Harvard University in 2018.
But at the time it was considered to be “the most boring, garden-variety event”.
However, a few years later, it became apparent that the black hole had begun to emit “quite a lot of energy” in the form of radio waves.
Cendes first published the discovery in 2022, and has since revealed that the energy being released has risen sharply.
“It’s now 50 times brighter than it was when originally detected in 2019,” Hamers said.
The data was collected using large radio telescopes that measure radiation from across space.
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
Here’s what you need to know…
What is a black hole?
- A black hole is a region of space where absolutely nothing can escape
- That’s because they have extremely strong gravitational effects, which means once something goes into a black hole, it can’t come back out
- They get their name because even light can’t escape once it’s been captured – which is why a black hole is completely dark
What is an event horizon?
- There has to be a point at which you’re so close to a black hole you can’t escape
- Otherwise, literally everything in the universe would have been sucked into one
- The point at which you can no longer escape from a black hole’s gravitational pull is called the event horizon
- The event horizon varies between different black holes, depending on their mass and size
What is a singularity?
- The gravitational singularity is the very centre of a black hole
- It’s a one-dimensional point that contains an incredibly large mass in an infinitely small space
- At the singularity, space-time curves infinitely, and the gravitational pull is infinitely strong
- Conventional laws of physics stop applying at this point
How are black holes created?
- Most black holes are made when a supergiant star dies
- This happens when stars run out of fuel – like hydrogen – to burn, causing the star to collapse
- When this happens, gravity pulls the center of the star inwards quickly and collapses into a tiny ball
- It expands and contracts until one final collapse, causing part of the star to collapse inward thanks to gravity, and the rest of the star to explode outwards
- The remaining central ball is extremely dense, and if it’s especially dense, you get a black hole
- Supermassive black holes are created when multiple black holes merge or when massive gas clouds collapse
And they calculated that the current energy outflow was “astounding” in its intensity.
“[The jet is] on a par with a gamma ray burst and potentially placing it among the most powerful single events ever detected in the universe,” Hamers explained.
“To put it in other terms: avid Star Wars fans have done calculations of how much energy the infamous super-powerful Death Star would emit.
“This black hole is emitting at least a trillion times that, and possibly closer to 100 trillion times.”
And it’s expected to grow even more powerful until a 2027 peak.
This research was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
