The furthest detection achieved to date

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a star got too close to a supermassive black hole and ended up being swallowed.

That is the dramatic scene that astronomers have captured thanks to the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO's VLT) in northern Chile and that we see reproduced in this animation that serves to illustrate the sad end of the star and perhaps of the planets that could be orbiting it.

It is not the first time that a black hole has been captured eating a star, but this is the furthest detection achieved to date, the light from the event came out when the universe was only a third of its real age, that is, it had to travel a little more than 8,600 million light years.

Stars that are too close to a black hole are torn apart by the incredible tidal forces of the black hole, in what is known as a disruption event or TDE for its in English, this specific event has been called AT2022cmc.

About 1% of these events cause jets of plasma and radiation to have been ejected from the poles of the spinning black hole, but you may be wondering if black holes swallow everything and everything that goes in can't get out of them, where do those jets come from?

The point is that the first part is not true, black holes are not capable of swallowing everything and the jets and the light that we see come not from the black hole, not from its interior but from what happens around it on the outside, The matter before falling is shredded, it rotates at such speed and with enormous energy, producing very very strange phenomena.

In 1971, black hole pioneer John Wheeler described these jets as like a tube of toothpaste that is forcefully blown out from the middle, causing the tube to burst and ejecting material from the ends, as a black hole tries to swallow a passing star. something similar, although we have only seen a handful of these jets in the cosmos, so they are still very exotic and little-known events and for that reason they are also so interesting to astronomers.

Because in the extreme, the exotic and the little known is the limit of the universe that we know and there begins the universe to be discovered.

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