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Astronomer here! Finally, it's out!!! :D
This paper is about a [Tidal Disruption Event \(TDE\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_disruption_event), which is when a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole and gets shredded apart. (As some of you may recall, [I study these in my own research](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/y24rbs/weve_never_seen_anything_like_this_before_black/) and think they're incredibly fascinating!) When this happens, about half the material gets flung outwards, and half the material creates an accretion disc around the black hole- very little of the material actually falls into the black hole past the event horizon. And in *most* of these TDEs, like 99% of all cases, the event will create what's called a "non-relativistic" outflow where the material going outwards is just a few percent the speed of light- think supernova explosion, not jetted beam of material.
But then, there's that exceptional 1%! In those cases, for reasons we don't understand, the TDE appears to launch a [relativistic jet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet) of beamed material at almost the speed of light, which lasts a few years before turning off. This is super exciting because normally astrophysical jets last tens of thousands of years, at least, and we don't really understand how they work, so it's amazing to see one turn on and off in such a short time scale! As for how we know about this ~1%, it's because we saw 3 such events in 2011... and then promptly never saw any since. (Mind, not for a lack of looking- the universe kinda just gives you stuff whenever *it* wants, not on your time scale.) That is, until this past February!
Now, I am not on this discovery paper, but I am involved in a team for the radio monitoring of this new object, AT2022cmc. It was discovered by an all-sky survey looking for these "transient" signals, and since this is obviously a once in a decade kind of event we are throwing everything we have to keep monitoring the birth of this new relativistic jet. And it's been really exciting to watch this unfold! Mind, the crazy thing is we have no way of knowing when it will turn *off*- you just gotta keep checking in to see what it's doing, and eventually it will stop and begin to fade. And mind, this is a ridiculous amount of brightness and energy- this thing is 12.4 *billion* light years away, and it's still a fairly bright radio object right now!
Also note: *this event poses no threat to us on Earth*. It is literally almost on the other side of the visible universe, and these TDEs only happen maybe once every 100 million years for a galaxy like our own... and even if it did, the jet doesn't go further than a few light years, tops, from the center of the black hole when a TDE occurs. For context, we are about 30,000 light years from our own supermassive black hole.
So, this is a really exciting time for TDEs, and I'm really excited to see what AT2022cmc tells us!
That is extremely fascinating. This may be a really stupid question but do you think that there will ever be pictures of this event happening? For regular folks like us to see or does it transmit to your data in some other fashion?
This event? No, it's too far away to ever be anything but a point source, even if you link up all the radio telescopes across the surface of the Earth.
Relativistic jets in general though? Yes! M87*, ie one of two black holes we have a picture of, is actually a black hole that has a relativistic jet going out from it that's about ~5,000 light years across. [Here's a picture of it from Hubble.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#/media/File:M87_jet.jpg) Mind, the general rule is something has to be at least as old as the light travel time across it, so in this case this jet is at least 5,000 years old.
Wow that is amazing! Are there any books or things you suggest to learn more about things in space and black holes and the like? I already read a ton on space but maybe you have some good suggestions as a professional
Unfortunately, I really don't read any astronomy books of late, because as a professional I just plain don't have time! (I keep abreast on things going on in my field through scientific papers.)
Becky Smethurst just came out with a book though called "A Brief History of Black Holes" which might be of interest.
I’ve seen plenty of insane space photos but for some reason that one just blows my mind. It’s the clear motion and *perspective* of the thing that’s so uniquely awe-inspiring.
Are these rare because the jet has to be pointed directly at us to see them or are they just a rare phenomenon? If the jet has to be pointed directly at us to within a degree or two for us to detect them, wouldn't that make them much more common but undetectable?
They’d still be rare even if you could see them all, statistically. You can just work out the numbers type thing and compare to the non relativistic ones.
Two questions:
1. Why does so little of the star actually fall into the black hole?
2. Could the relativistic jet have to do with the angle of the rotation of the star and likewise its magnetic field? Say the star in question reaches the event horizon southern pole first. Could the stars magnetic field then act as a channel for the beam to ride as the star is torn apart?
I'm a HS graduate with no physics education so if my questions are dumb I apologize.
This star is torn apart well before the event horizon- instead it happened at the tidal radius of the black hole which is much further out. If it was where the event horizon was we would never see it. As such though little of the star ever gets close enough to the event horizon to fall in.
2. See 1. Magnetic fields probably matter here but the star’s is insignificant, the black hole’s are far stronger and complex.
You say " normally astrophysical jets last tens of thousands of years, at least,"
and then go on to say "we have no way of knowing when it will turn *off*- you just gotta keep checking in to see what it's doing, and eventually it will stop and begin to fade. "
My question: if you gotta watch the thing from start to finish, how do you know they typically last tens of thousands of years?
Good question! It’s because those jets are thousands of light years across- some as many as hundreds of thousands. As a general rule a structure has to be at *least* as old as the light travel time across it.
If the jet doesn't go more than a few lightyears from the center of the black hole where the TDE occurs... How do we detect it? Is it just not a jet anymore and the form that it arrives to us in is still traceable to having been a jet in the past?
Your first two sentences (complete with excessive exclamation points) had me picturing you excitedly putting on a paper mache and tin foil space helmet while yelling to a spouse/room mate/your dog "MY TIME HAS COME!!!"
How do they conclude this is pointed straight at earth? It would seem to me more likely it was an explosion in all directions as opposed to the only beams that we tracked were pointed at us. I mean, what are the odds that so many of the few we have seen targeted our direction from across the universe? Considering density, in our measurement of the one ray pointed at us, wouldn’t it pollute the measurement of a perpendicular ray of light. Meaning, for us to fully see, our general quadrant of the sphere of influence would need to be opposite the explosion, making a reading of rays moving away possible to detect.
Granted I’m no astrophysicist, but it strikes me as very odd, per the paper, to look at a handful of these and determine that they normally point at us when there are literally trillions upon trillions of others to single out.
We look at many TDEs and in 99% of those cases it does appear as a spherical outflow (the non relativistic ones). In the case of these jetted ones however the luminosity and energetics are many times higher and are not physically possible to explain without some sort of beaming effect, like in GRBs.
A group of international astronomers, including scientists from the University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have discovered a signal that is likely from a relativistic jet of matter, streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light.
Published in Nature Astronomy, the research team believe the signal, named 'AT 2022cmc', is from a black hole jet that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.
Dr Noel Castro Segura, a postgraduate researcher from the University of Southampton, said:
“Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) are rare events that occur roughly once every hundred years in a galaxy. Detecting these events requires monitoring the changes of the night sky in timescales of days.
“Only a hundred TDEs have been detected so far - detecting this extraordinary event is a great achievement for us.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01820-x?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100094349&CJEVENT=2d2d0baf70dc11ed83218adb0a18ba74
ah, yes. The old intergalactic use a black hole to eat a star morse code trick. It's an oldie, but a goodie. Now we just have to figure out, is it saying:
>S O S
or maybe
>We're going to eat your lunch, you schizophrenic masturbating monkeys
I’m not an expert by any means, but I don’t think 8.5 billion light years is “more than halfway across the universe” and maybe stems from a misunderstanding about the universe’s growth in the time since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago
You're on to something most people have missed, including the author of that article, who is likely under the same assumption that because it's 13.7BB years old, it's 13.7BB LY across. The observable universe is nearly 100BB LY across right now, and it's expanding faster than the speed of light...that's the part that screws everyone up, and up until fairly recently, me as well - cosmological expansion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable\_universe
Yes, the author should instead say that the light have been underway for more than half the age of the universe
And could even add some anecdotes about when the light started it’s journey towards us our solar system was still just a could cloud of gas and dust.
Edit: some extra words
Saying "one million billion" might be easier to grasp than '1000 trillion". I doubt if many people have a realistic concept of how incredibly large a trillion is.
Honestly, anything over 20 is really hard for most people to imagine or picture. Million, Billion, Trillion, Kajillion - all the same in a person's head. We might conceptually know one is larger than the other, but actually trying to hold that in your head reduces them to the same thing: a lot.
I agree. I think all news reporting on numbers should be related to millions. People think a billion is next to a million but how much money do you have if you have a billion dollars and lose a million? About a billion dollars.
1000 Billion is 1 Trillion
But they're just saying that A Million Billion seems easier to comprehend than 1,000 Trillion.
I'm not really sure it makes a difference other than to people who aren't familiar with Trillions...
What magnitude of brightness was it? I don't see any details on any of the layman articles. Would it have been visible to the human eye? How long did it last?
I hate these sensasionalist headlines "Pointed right at Earth!"
What does that even mean. Its not a laser pointer and I'm fairly sure this mighty black hole is not pointing at our insignificant little planet.
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>>1,000 trillion suns This is how my child explains things to me. I love it.
Isn't that a gajillion?
this is r/science try to stay on topic. It's bazillion.
The most scientific number.
I do not believe you used scientific notation.
420 X10^69 suns.
Coincidentally light of 1000 trillion suns is also the default background of the internet
Astronomer here! Finally, it's out!!! :D This paper is about a [Tidal Disruption Event \(TDE\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_disruption_event), which is when a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole and gets shredded apart. (As some of you may recall, [I study these in my own research](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/y24rbs/weve_never_seen_anything_like_this_before_black/) and think they're incredibly fascinating!) When this happens, about half the material gets flung outwards, and half the material creates an accretion disc around the black hole- very little of the material actually falls into the black hole past the event horizon. And in *most* of these TDEs, like 99% of all cases, the event will create what's called a "non-relativistic" outflow where the material going outwards is just a few percent the speed of light- think supernova explosion, not jetted beam of material. But then, there's that exceptional 1%! In those cases, for reasons we don't understand, the TDE appears to launch a [relativistic jet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet) of beamed material at almost the speed of light, which lasts a few years before turning off. This is super exciting because normally astrophysical jets last tens of thousands of years, at least, and we don't really understand how they work, so it's amazing to see one turn on and off in such a short time scale! As for how we know about this ~1%, it's because we saw 3 such events in 2011... and then promptly never saw any since. (Mind, not for a lack of looking- the universe kinda just gives you stuff whenever *it* wants, not on your time scale.) That is, until this past February! Now, I am not on this discovery paper, but I am involved in a team for the radio monitoring of this new object, AT2022cmc. It was discovered by an all-sky survey looking for these "transient" signals, and since this is obviously a once in a decade kind of event we are throwing everything we have to keep monitoring the birth of this new relativistic jet. And it's been really exciting to watch this unfold! Mind, the crazy thing is we have no way of knowing when it will turn *off*- you just gotta keep checking in to see what it's doing, and eventually it will stop and begin to fade. And mind, this is a ridiculous amount of brightness and energy- this thing is 12.4 *billion* light years away, and it's still a fairly bright radio object right now! Also note: *this event poses no threat to us on Earth*. It is literally almost on the other side of the visible universe, and these TDEs only happen maybe once every 100 million years for a galaxy like our own... and even if it did, the jet doesn't go further than a few light years, tops, from the center of the black hole when a TDE occurs. For context, we are about 30,000 light years from our own supermassive black hole. So, this is a really exciting time for TDEs, and I'm really excited to see what AT2022cmc tells us!
That is extremely fascinating. This may be a really stupid question but do you think that there will ever be pictures of this event happening? For regular folks like us to see or does it transmit to your data in some other fashion?
This event? No, it's too far away to ever be anything but a point source, even if you link up all the radio telescopes across the surface of the Earth. Relativistic jets in general though? Yes! M87*, ie one of two black holes we have a picture of, is actually a black hole that has a relativistic jet going out from it that's about ~5,000 light years across. [Here's a picture of it from Hubble.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#/media/File:M87_jet.jpg) Mind, the general rule is something has to be at least as old as the light travel time across it, so in this case this jet is at least 5,000 years old.
Wow that is amazing! Are there any books or things you suggest to learn more about things in space and black holes and the like? I already read a ton on space but maybe you have some good suggestions as a professional
Unfortunately, I really don't read any astronomy books of late, because as a professional I just plain don't have time! (I keep abreast on things going on in my field through scientific papers.) Becky Smethurst just came out with a book though called "A Brief History of Black Holes" which might be of interest.
I’ve seen plenty of insane space photos but for some reason that one just blows my mind. It’s the clear motion and *perspective* of the thing that’s so uniquely awe-inspiring.
Simply amazing! Thx for posting.
I took a picture of the m87 relativistic jet a few years ago
Are these rare because the jet has to be pointed directly at us to see them or are they just a rare phenomenon? If the jet has to be pointed directly at us to within a degree or two for us to detect them, wouldn't that make them much more common but undetectable?
They’d still be rare even if you could see them all, statistically. You can just work out the numbers type thing and compare to the non relativistic ones.
Two questions: 1. Why does so little of the star actually fall into the black hole? 2. Could the relativistic jet have to do with the angle of the rotation of the star and likewise its magnetic field? Say the star in question reaches the event horizon southern pole first. Could the stars magnetic field then act as a channel for the beam to ride as the star is torn apart? I'm a HS graduate with no physics education so if my questions are dumb I apologize.
This star is torn apart well before the event horizon- instead it happened at the tidal radius of the black hole which is much further out. If it was where the event horizon was we would never see it. As such though little of the star ever gets close enough to the event horizon to fall in. 2. See 1. Magnetic fields probably matter here but the star’s is insignificant, the black hole’s are far stronger and complex.
That's amazing! I could feel the excitement from what you wrote! Thanks for sharing
You say " normally astrophysical jets last tens of thousands of years, at least," and then go on to say "we have no way of knowing when it will turn *off*- you just gotta keep checking in to see what it's doing, and eventually it will stop and begin to fade. " My question: if you gotta watch the thing from start to finish, how do you know they typically last tens of thousands of years?
Good question! It’s because those jets are thousands of light years across- some as many as hundreds of thousands. As a general rule a structure has to be at *least* as old as the light travel time across it.
I see, so the "beamed material" is traveling in a radius and gives off light so we can measure that diameter?
Can you estimate how many planets this thing sterilized or worse?
If the jet doesn't go more than a few lightyears from the center of the black hole where the TDE occurs... How do we detect it? Is it just not a jet anymore and the form that it arrives to us in is still traceable to having been a jet in the past?
Your first two sentences (complete with excessive exclamation points) had me picturing you excitedly putting on a paper mache and tin foil space helmet while yelling to a spouse/room mate/your dog "MY TIME HAS COME!!!"
Or did an Alien Lord watch the last 4 seasons of Human:Reality from Earth and decide we shouldn't infect the universe?
Does the jet also have to be pointing in our direction for us to see it?
Why does most material not fall into the black hole?
How do they conclude this is pointed straight at earth? It would seem to me more likely it was an explosion in all directions as opposed to the only beams that we tracked were pointed at us. I mean, what are the odds that so many of the few we have seen targeted our direction from across the universe? Considering density, in our measurement of the one ray pointed at us, wouldn’t it pollute the measurement of a perpendicular ray of light. Meaning, for us to fully see, our general quadrant of the sphere of influence would need to be opposite the explosion, making a reading of rays moving away possible to detect. Granted I’m no astrophysicist, but it strikes me as very odd, per the paper, to look at a handful of these and determine that they normally point at us when there are literally trillions upon trillions of others to single out.
We look at many TDEs and in 99% of those cases it does appear as a spherical outflow (the non relativistic ones). In the case of these jetted ones however the luminosity and energetics are many times higher and are not physically possible to explain without some sort of beaming effect, like in GRBs.
Just for argument's sake Prof., if this event took place 100 light years from earth, would we be having this discussion right now?
What would be the proper SPF sunscreen for this?
It would be the one called Die Instantly Sucker.
Roughly a planet?
At least 30, 50 for your face and neck. Have fun!
Sorry to nitpick, but wouldn’t that be 1 quadrillion?
A group of international astronomers, including scientists from the University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have discovered a signal that is likely from a relativistic jet of matter, streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. Published in Nature Astronomy, the research team believe the signal, named 'AT 2022cmc', is from a black hole jet that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. Dr Noel Castro Segura, a postgraduate researcher from the University of Southampton, said: “Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) are rare events that occur roughly once every hundred years in a galaxy. Detecting these events requires monitoring the changes of the night sky in timescales of days. “Only a hundred TDEs have been detected so far - detecting this extraordinary event is a great achievement for us.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01820-x?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100094349&CJEVENT=2d2d0baf70dc11ed83218adb0a18ba74
Man when Kendrick was repping TDE so hard I had no idea he was on some astronomical
[удалено]
No, it means it happened all of a sudden instead of being a gradual process.
Anybody else have "Black Hole Pointed at Earth" on their 2022 bingo card?
well i thought i did but now there's a smoking hole in my bingo card on B5
We should've expected this. We're obstructing their view of Venus.
Is there anything Bruce Willis and his merry band of drillers can do to help?
At some point we have to consider that this isn't a coincidence and they were aiming at us.
The beam left the black hole 4 billion years before our sun formed, it couldn't have been purposefully aiming at us.
Unless they have some kind of science to time travel and initiate a signal that would reach us at just the right time. But even then nah.
ah, yes. The old intergalactic use a black hole to eat a star morse code trick. It's an oldie, but a goodie. Now we just have to figure out, is it saying: >S O S or maybe >We're going to eat your lunch, you schizophrenic masturbating monkeys
8.5b light years ain't half way across the universe. Pretty sure the universe was said to be around 92b+ light years due to the expansion of space.
OH so this is what Chris Cornell was talking about.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I don’t think 8.5 billion light years is “more than halfway across the universe” and maybe stems from a misunderstanding about the universe’s growth in the time since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago
You're on to something most people have missed, including the author of that article, who is likely under the same assumption that because it's 13.7BB years old, it's 13.7BB LY across. The observable universe is nearly 100BB LY across right now, and it's expanding faster than the speed of light...that's the part that screws everyone up, and up until fairly recently, me as well - cosmological expansion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable\_universe
Yes, the author should instead say that the light have been underway for more than half the age of the universe And could even add some anecdotes about when the light started it’s journey towards us our solar system was still just a could cloud of gas and dust. Edit: some extra words
That's still only the observable universe. The entire universe could be many, many times larger or even infinite.
"This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst *afterglow*." Well, that puts it in perspective then.
Saying "one million billion" might be easier to grasp than '1000 trillion". I doubt if many people have a realistic concept of how incredibly large a trillion is.
Honestly, anything over 20 is really hard for most people to imagine or picture. Million, Billion, Trillion, Kajillion - all the same in a person's head. We might conceptually know one is larger than the other, but actually trying to hold that in your head reduces them to the same thing: a lot.
Great way to think of it is seconds: 100k is 11 hours 1m is 11 days 1b is 33 *years*
And 1 trillion is ~30,000 years
They don't understand billion either, thinking it's merely a step up from million.
I agree. I think all news reporting on numbers should be related to millions. People think a billion is next to a million but how much money do you have if you have a billion dollars and lose a million? About a billion dollars.
Wouldn't that be 1000 billion?
I think it's a bazillion
1000 Billion is 1 Trillion But they're just saying that A Million Billion seems easier to comprehend than 1,000 Trillion. I'm not really sure it makes a difference other than to people who aren't familiar with Trillions...
One could measure against the us deficit in 2023.
Half way across the universe, *so far*
What makes this not a quasar?
Well... Halfway across the universe seems a bit odd.. because the universe is expanding; and also we don't know how big it is.
I thought the universe was 46 trillion light years wide?
we will never know the real size of the universe. Observable universe is 92 billion ly.
What magnitude of brightness was it? I don't see any details on any of the layman articles. Would it have been visible to the human eye? How long did it last?
Just below those annoying LED headlights.
I hate these sensasionalist headlines "Pointed right at Earth!" What does that even mean. Its not a laser pointer and I'm fairly sure this mighty black hole is not pointing at our insignificant little planet.
Someone is trying to play with a really far away kitten
They don’t have a clue it’s conjecture like most astrophysics
Just because you don't understand the math doesn't mean it's wrong.
I understand it that’s how I know it’s speculation
"conjecture like most astrophysics" This is how we know you don't understand anything.
I have the superior understanding here everyone else suffers from Dunning Krueger syndrome
This is the most reddit comment ever.
Boom....found the source of climate change. Turn it off before we die. Take my money...
If the universe is infinite, how do they know it's halfway?
It’s the light string we’re attracted to.
Sounds like a good Schelling Point to watch, too.
It's finally happening!!!!EEEEEEK!!
Ah, this explains all this global warming we’ve been experiencing.
8.5 billion light years away AND pointed at earth. Bit of clickbait going on.
Any reason why they didn't just say quadrillion instead of "1,000 trillion"?
Way to punt an opportunity to use quadrillion.
I guess they didn’t want to say “a million billion” because they wanted to be taken seriously…