Flare From 'Spaghettified' Star Is as Bright as 10T Suns

Scientists have spotted the brightest flare yet from a supermassive black hole that shines with the light of 10 trillion suns. These bursts of light and energy can come from things like tangled-up magnetic fields or hiccups in the heated gas disks surrounding black holes. The flares help illuminate researchers' understanding of the black holes within. The latest cosmic display was spotted in 2018 by a camera at the Palomar Observatory in California, the AP reports. It took about three months to shine at peak brightness and has been decaying in the years since. The new findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"At first, we didn't really believe the numbers about the energy," said study author Matthew Graham with the California Institute of Technology, which operates Palomar. The flare likely happened because an unusually large star, up to 200 times the size of our sun, wandered too close to the black hole. Researchers believe the star was probably knocked out of its orbit by a collision with another large object. "However it happened, the star wandered close enough to the supermassive black hole that it was 'spaghettified'—that is, stretched out to become long and thin, due to the gravity of the supermassive black hole strengthening as you get very close to it," said study co-author KE Saavik Ford, per Reuters. "That material then spiraled around the supermassive black hole as it fell in."

The flare came from a supermassive black hole that's 10 billion light-years away, making the flash the most distant one observed so far. It hails from a time when the universe was rather young. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles. Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center—but scientists still aren't sure how they form. Studying such behemoths can help researchers better understand the stellar neighborhood surrounding supermassive black holes.

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The discovery also allows scientists "to probe the interaction of supermassive black holes with their environments early in the universe," said Joseph Michail with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which didn't have a role in the new study. Those early interactions created the cosmos we now call home.