Overview
- The outburst from AGN J2245+3743 peaked at roughly the power of 10 trillion Suns after a ~40-fold jump in brightness detected in 2018.
- Researchers report a total energy near 10^54 ergs, far exceeding previous black-hole flares.
- Spectroscopy places the source about 10 billion light-years away and indicates a central black hole of roughly 500 million solar masses.
- Multiwavelength data favor a tidal disruption event in which an approximately 30–solar-mass star was shredded within the galaxy’s active nucleus.
- The flare has been fading for more than six Earth-years, a duration stretched by cosmological time dilation, and teams continue monitoring while surveys such as ZTF and Catalina pave the way for finding similar extremes.