Overview
- A Nature Astronomy paper led by Caltech’s Matthew Graham details an outburst that radiated roughly the light of 10 trillion suns, setting a new record for black hole flares.
- The transient, first flagged by the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2018, rose to peak over about three months and has been fading since, with the full event expected to span around 11 years.
- Follow-up in 2023 established the source lies about 10–11 billion light-years away, implying intrinsic luminosity about 30 times greater than any previously observed flare of its kind.
- Researchers estimate the black hole’s mass at several hundred million suns and the disrupted star at least about 30 solar masses, with some analyses allowing up to roughly 200.
- Spectroscopy from Keck and checks with WISE support the extreme brightness; alternatives such as a supernova, jet activity, or gravitational lensing were deemed inconsistent, and the event offers new leverage to study AGN variability and massive-star formation in accretion disks.