The source of bright radiation in many slits, codenamed AT 2022cmc, is a supermassive black hole. This was reported by the University of Birmingham press service.
The AT 2022cmc signal was recorded by astronomers in early 2022. It is noticeable in the X-ray, optical and radio ranges and is characterized by high brightness. Because of this, astronomers were not immediately able to definitively classify the object.
Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Birmingham have concluded that they have observed a tidal disruption event that astronomers call the process by which a black hole shatters a star and turns it into spaghetti. AT 2022cmc is abnormally bright for such events and lies 8.5 billion light-years from Earth – the most distant known source of this type. The nature of this object has been confirmed by observations made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile operating in the optical range. The spectrometer showed that the temperature of the emitted gas exceeded 30 thousand degrees – that’s a lot, but a typical tidal disturbance event.
The increased luminosity is achieved not because of temperature, but because the jet of matter is directed directly at the Earth. The brightness of the radiation increases due to “Doppler improvement”. Also, because AT 2022cmc shines so brightly and for a long time, scientists suggest it’s produced by a supermassive black hole that absorbs the mass of a star each year and is equivalent to 0.5 suns.