A supermassive black hole violently gobbled up an enormous star, producing a gargantuan cosmic outburst, according to a new study.
A supermassive black hole violently gobbled up an enormous star, producing a gargantuan cosmic outburst, according to a new study.
The black hole flare, as the phenomenon is known, is thought to be the biggest and most distant ever recorded — it was detected from 10 billion light-years away.
“This is really a one-in-a-million object,” said Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
If something like that happened with our black hole, how long would it take to be visible to us, and how cool would it be?
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius a. It’s about 26000 light years away, so if an event like that happened it would take 26000 years for us to notice. (But who’s to say that an event like that didn’t happen 25999 years ago? Perhaps we’ll see it tomorrow.)
I honestly have no idea where it would fall on the coolness scale. Somewhere between “an astronomer noticed an abnormally bright star” and “my God… so this is how it ends…” So… somewhere between “meh” and “shit”?