China News Service, Beijing, December 1 (Reporter Sun Zifa) The internationally renowned academic journal "Nature" and the professional academic journal "Nature-Astronomy" published papers respectively, saying that researchers reported a rare tidal disintegration event (TDE, when a The process of releasing energy when a star is torn apart by a supermassive black hole), the event occurred in a galaxy about 12.4 billion light-years from Earth, the study found that may improve our understanding of the properties of black holes at cosmological distances understanding.

　　According to the paper, TDE observations provide an opportunity to study how supermassive black holes grow by accumulating (or accreting) matter: when a star is subjected to a rapid tug from the black hole, the star disintegrates and its matter falls on the black hole. on the accretion disk.

In some cases, the accreted matter will produce a strong jet of matter, and in rare cases TDE will also lead to the production of relativistic jets, whose speed is close to the speed of light, but such events are very rare, and astronomers have no idea little understanding.

The latest observations reported here improve understanding of this rare event.

Schematic of tidal disruption (Credit: Cark Knox, Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology).

Photo courtesy of Springer Nature

　　Co-corresponding authors of the "Nature" paper, Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Michael Coughlin of the University of Minnesota, and their collaborators, and corresponding authors of the "Nature-Astronomy" paper , Dheeraj R. Pasham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-authors report the detection of a transient event designated AT2022cmc that releases enormous energy using optical band and multiple telescopes at other wavelengths, consistent with radiation from stars releasing bright jets as they violently collapse when they get too close to a supermassive black hole.

These observations, especially the observations at X-ray wavelengths, show that extremely strong energy is involved, and the rapid changes in brightness and the persistence of the entire event are the hallmarks of rare relativistic ejection TDEs. Only 4 such events have been reported so far. This time is one of them.

While most detected TDEs originate in the nearby universe, this event came from a galaxy about 12.4 billion light-years away, visible from Earth because of its extraordinary brightness.

　　Through the simulation research of this event, the author of the "Nature-Astronomy" paper is more inclined to the scenario that a star with the same volume and mass as the sun is disintegrated by a relatively low-mass black hole.

They point out that the deduced magnetic field is particularly low, contrary to the conventional theory that such strong relativistic jets require high magnetic fields.

The authors of the "Nature" paper concluded that their research results confirmed that about 1% of TDEs have relativistic jets, verifying previous predictions about the rarity of such events.

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