Overview
- A peer-reviewed Nature Astronomy paper on November 4 confirms the most luminous black-hole flare yet, peaking near the light of 10 trillion Suns and about 30 times brighter than prior records.
- The event originates from the active galactic nucleus J2245+3743 roughly 10 billion light-years away, whose central black hole is estimated at about 500 million solar masses.
- Initial detections by the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey in 2018 were later reanalyzed, with 2023 Keck spectra establishing its distance and extreme luminosity.
- Multiwavelength analyses, including WISE infrared data, rule out beaming, lensing, or a supernova and favor a tidal disruption of a star at least 30 times the Sun’s mass.
- The flare is still observable with its evolution stretched by cosmological time dilation, and teams are monitoring its fade while preparing surveys to find similarly rare events.