Overview
- The peer-reviewed findings appear in Science Advances and were led by researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with Cardiff University co-authors.
- X-ray monitoring by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and radio measurements from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array revealed synchronized 20-day oscillations in the accretion disk and jet.
- The team models the behavior as Lense–Thirring precession, attributing the coupled disk–jet wobble to spacetime being twisted by a rapidly rotating supermassive black hole.
- AT2020afhd’s radio emission varied on short timescales rather than remaining steady as in many past TDEs, a pattern the authors say strengthens the coprecession interpretation.
- Researchers say the detection validates a key general relativity prediction and opens a new avenue to probe black hole spin, accretion dynamics, and the origins of relativistic jets.