Overview
- The Nature Astronomy study published November 4 identifies the source as an active galactic nucleus powered by a black hole of roughly 500 million solar masses.
- The team concludes the flare most likely resulted from a tidal disruption event, reaching a luminosity about 30 times greater than previous black-hole flares.
- The outburst is still in progress, with cosmological time dilation making its evolution appear four times slower from Earth.
- The object was first flagged in 2018 by the Catalina survey and ZTF, with Keck spectroscopy later establishing its distance and extreme energetics.
- Researchers describe such events as exceptionally rare and link them to a burgeoning class of extreme nuclear transients that may reveal unexpectedly massive stars near galactic centers.