Overview
- The study, led by Caltech’s Matthew Graham and published November 4 in Nature Astronomy, reports a record superflare from active galactic nucleus J2245+3743.
- At its peak the event shone with the light of about 10 trillion suns, making it roughly 30 times more luminous than any previously observed black-hole flare.
- The source is an accreting supermassive black hole estimated to be on the order of hundreds of millions of solar masses that likely tore apart a star at least 30 times the mass of the Sun.
- ZTF first flagged the transient in 2018 after a months-long brightening by a factor of about 40; it peaked that year and has since faded slowly, with ongoing monitoring and cosmological time dilation stretching its apparent duration.
- The team ruled out alternatives such as a supernova, gravitational lensing, or ordinary AGN variability, highlighting new insights into AGN behavior and the presence of unusually massive stars in these environments.