It can be difficult for us humans to truly comprehend vast numbers. Even the scale of a million or a billion can be hard to visualise. Yet scientists are now asking us to think on an even grander scale, after recording the largest and most distant black hole flare ever detected – and the figures involved are astonishing.
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The event took place at an active galactic nucleus (AGN) — essentially a feeding or accreting black hole — estimated to be 500 million times more massive than our Sun and located some 10 billion light years away. Researchers believe the flare was triggered by a tidal disruption event, in which the immense gravitational pull of the AGN dragged in and consumed a nearby star.
According to the team, the doomed star had roughly 30 times the mass of our Sun. During its peak, the flare is thought to have shone as brightly as 10 trillion suns, according to a summary of the findings shared by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
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“This is unlike any AGN we’ve ever seen,” said Professor Matthew Graham, co-principal investigator of the study, research professor of astronomy at Caltech, and project scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first observed the black hole in 2018 in conjunction with the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey. The detailed research on the black hole and its extraordinary flare was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
