Astronomers attend the death of a giant star 0:59
(CNN) --
An incredibly bright flash that appeared in the night sky in February was the result of a star straying too close to a supermassive black hole, meeting its untimely end there when it blew apart.
But the rare cosmic event actually occurred 8.5 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was only a third of its current age, and it has created more questions than answers.
The signal from the bright burst, known as AT 2022cmc, was first captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory on February 11.
This graphic shows what a tidal disruption event might look like in space.
(Credit: Carl Knox/OzGrav/Swinburne University of Technology)
When a star is torn apart by the gravitational tidal forces of a black hole, it is known as a tidal disruption event.
Astronomers have observed such violent events before, but AT 2022cmc is brighter than any previously discovered.
It is also the most distant ever observed.
bright lights
Astronomers believe that when the black hole engulfed the star, it released an enormous amount of energy and sent a jet of material hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light.
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AT 2022cmc likely appeared so bright in our sky because the jet was pointed directly at Earth, creating what is known as a "Doppler drive" effect.
The discovery could reveal more about the growth of supermassive black holes, as well as how they eat stars.
Two separate studies detailing the event were published Wednesday in the journals Nature Astronomy and Nature.
Gamma-ray bursts, the powerful jets of X-rays released when massive stars collapse, usually account for the brightest flashes in the night sky.
"Gamma-ray bursts are the usual suspects for events like this," Nature Astronomy study co-author Dr. Benjamin Gompertz, who led the gamma-ray burst comparison analysis for the paper, said in a statement.
“However, as bright as they are, there is only so much light that a collapsing star can produce.
Because AT 2022cmc was so bright and lasted so long, we knew that something truly gigantic must be propelling it: a supermassive black hole," said Gompertz, an assistant professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Different light emissions were created during the tidal disruption event.
(Credit: Zwicky Transient Facility/R.Hurt)
The astronomers used the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, to analyze the signal.
The researchers determined that AT 2022cmc was "100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow" previously recorded, according to Dheeraj Pasham, lead study author of the Nature Astronomy paper and a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Research. Space from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Look at the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy
First, the star was torn to pieces, then bits of it were dragged toward the spinning disk that orbited the black hole's point of no return.
The extreme X-rays released by the event were created when the shredded star spun a whirlwind of debris as it fell into the black hole.
a strange event
The Zwicky transient facility is one of the largest used to study the universe and spy on unusual cosmic events.
After it first detected the signal, several dozen other telescopes on the ground and in space focused on AT 2022cmc, providing an incredibly detailed look at the rare event.
This is how the images of the James Webb telescope vs.
those of the hubble
The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile helped determine its distance from Earth, while the Hubble Space Telescope captured the visible and infrared light released by the event.
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array of telescopes in New Mexico picked up radio waves.
Only about 1% of tidal disruption events result in relativistic jets (or beams moving at close to the speed of light) spewing plasma and radiation from the poles of a rotating black hole.
NASA to launch a new X-ray telescope designed to solve the mysteries of black holes
"The last time scientists discovered one of these jets was more than a decade ago," Michael Coughlin, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and co-lead author of the study on the Nature paper, said in a statement.
Astronomers still don't understand why some tidal disruption events create these jets while others don't, but the black hole may need to spin particularly fast to create a jet in the first place.
Observing more events like this could reveal how black holes shoot such powerful jets through space, according to the researchers.
"Astronomy is changing rapidly," said Igor Andreoni, a postdoctoral associate in the department of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and co-lead author of the study on the Nature paper, in a statement.
"Scientists can use AT 2022cmc as a model to know what to look for and to find more disruptive events from distant black holes."