Super-distant black hole is eating half a sun a year and blasting its leftovers at Earth

超遥远的黑洞每年吞噬半个太阳，并将其残余物喷向地球

Astronomers have made the most distant observation of a black hole ripping apart a star and feasting upon it, thanks to a jet of stellar "leftovers" blasted directly toward Earth.

由于一股恒星“剩余物”直接向地球喷射，天文学家已经观测到一个黑洞撕裂一颗恒星并享用它的最远距离。

Because the jet is directed straight at Earth, the violent destruction of the star by this black hole, which astronomers call a tidal disruption event (TDE), was observable in visible light. The discovery could therefore signal a new way to observe such extreme events that are usually only detected in high-energy light, like gamma-rays and X-rays.

由于喷流直接指向地球，所以在可见光下可以观测到黑洞对恒星的猛烈破坏，天文学家称之为潮汐破坏事件(TDE)。因此，这一发现可能标志着一种观察极端事件的新方法，这些极端事件通常只能在伽玛射线和x射线等高能光线中探测到。

TDEs occur when stars wander too close to black holes. The black hole tears apart the star with incredibly powerful tidal forces created by its gravitational influence. In around 1% of TDEs, the black hole also blasts out jets of plasma and radiation from its poles.

当恒星离黑洞太近时就会发生TDEs。黑洞通过其引力作用产生的难以置信的强大潮汐力将恒星撕裂。在约1%的TDEs中，黑洞还从两极喷射出等离子体和辐射。

"We have only seen a handful of these jetted-TDEs and they remain very exotic and poorly understood events," Nial Tanvir, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in the U.K. and co-author on the new research, said in a statement (opens in new tab) from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates some of the telescopes used in the research. "Astronomers are thus constantly hunting for these extreme events to understand how the jets are actually created and why such a small fraction of TDEs produce them."

英国莱斯特大学(University of Leicester)的天文学家Nial Tanvir是这项新研究的合著者，他在一份来自欧洲南方天文台(ESO)的声明(在新标签中打开)中说:”我们只看到了少数这些喷射- tdes，它们仍然是非常奇特和知之甚少的事件。”ESO操作着研究中使用的一些望远镜。”因此，天文学家一直在寻找这些极端事件，以了解喷流是如何产生的，以及为什么只有这么小的一部分TDEs产生了它们。”

Related: 8 ways we know that black holes really do exist

相关链接:我们知道黑洞确实存在的8种方式

The discovery of this TDE, dubbed AT2022cmc, came in February, when a survey telescope, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California, sent out an alert about an unusual source of visible light, which ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile then jumped to examine. It's a common dynamic for astronomers: Survey telescopes like ZTF pan across the sky for signs of short-lived and extreme events, which more focused telescopes like the VLT can follow up on, observing in greater detail.

这个TDE被称为AT2022cmc，是在2月份发现的，当时加州的茨威基瞬变望远镜(ZTF)发出了关于一个不同寻常的可见光源的警报，智利北部阿塔卡马沙漠地区的ESO超大望远镜(VLT)随后立即进行了检查。对于天文学家来说，这是一种常见的动态:像ZTF这样的巡天望远镜穿过天空，寻找短暂和极端事件的迹象，像VLT这样的更集中的望远镜可以跟踪这些迹象，观察更详细的情况。

AT2022cmc first resembled a gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful source of electromagnetic radiation in the known universe, the origins of which remain unknown. The opportunity to observe one of these rare and mysterious blasts of light prompted astronomers to train a variety of telescopes on AT2022cmc, including the VLT, which studied the event using its X-shooter spectrograph instrument. All told, 21 telescopes observed AT2022cmc in various wavelengths of light, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray instrument aboard the International Space Station.

AT2022cmc首次类似于伽马射线暴(GRB)，这是已知宇宙中最强大的电磁辐射源，其来源仍然未知。观测这些罕见而神秘的光爆炸的机会促使天文学家在2022cmc上训练了各种望远镜，包括VLT，它使用X-shooter摄谱仪研究了这一事件。总共有21架望远镜在2022cmc观测到了不同波长的光，包括哈勃太空望远镜和国际空间站上的中子星内部成分探测器(NICER) x射线仪器。

The wealth of data revealed two strange observations. First, the source of AT2022cmc was located at an unprecedented distance from Earth and the light began its journey when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just one-third of its current age. Second, the event wasn't a gamma-ray burst.

大量的数据揭示了两个奇怪的现象。首先，AT2022cmc的光源距离地球的距离是前所未有的，当这个138亿岁的宇宙只有现在年龄的三分之一时，这束光就开始了它的旅程。其次，这次事件不是伽马射线暴。

"Things looked pretty normal the first three days," Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was first author on one of the studies, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

麻省理工学院天体物理学家Dheeraj Pasham是其中一项研究的第一作者，他在一份声明中说:“前三天看起来很正常。

"Then we looked at it with an X-ray telescope, and what we found was, the source was too bright," he said of the NICER observations, noting that the signal remained 100 times more powerful than the afterglow from any gamma-ray burst seen to date. "It was something extraordinary."

“然后我们用x射线望远镜观察它，我们发现，源太亮了，”他在谈到NICER观测时说，并指出，该信号仍然比迄今为止看到的任何伽马射线暴的余辉强100倍。“这是一件非同寻常的事情。”

Around the globe, a total of 21 telescopes observed AT2022cmc in various wavelengths of light, from high-energy gamma-rays to low-energy radio waves. Then, astronomers could compare this data to observations of other violent events, like collapsing stars and the powerful cosmic explosions called kilonovas.

在全球范围内，共有21台望远镜在不同波长的光中观测到AT2022cmc，从高能伽马射线到低能无线电波。然后，天文学家可以将这些数据与其他剧烈事件的观测结果进行比较，比如恒星坍缩和被称为千新星的强大宇宙爆炸。

The only scenario that matched the light profile recorded by these telescopes was the rare case when a TDE jet — containing matter moving at 99.99% the speed if light — points right at Earth.

与这些望远镜记录的光轮廓相匹配的唯一情况是，含有TDE射流的物质以光速99.99%的速度指向地球。

"Because the relativistic jet is pointing at us, it makes the event much brighter than it would otherwise appear, and visible over a broader span of the electromagnetic spectrum," Giorgos Leloudas, an astronomer at DTU Space in Denmark and co-author on the new research, said in the ESO statement.

丹麦DTU空间的天文学家、这项新研究的合著者Giorgos Leloudas在ESO的声明中说:”因为相对论喷流指向我们，它使事件比其他情况下看起来要明亮得多，并在更广泛的电磁波谱范围内可见。”

That said, the jet is still pretty bright — so bright that astronomers calculated the black hole is eating about half the sun's worth of mass each year, Pasham said, adding that the volume suggests the researchers spotted the event early on. "A lot of this tidal disruption happens early on, and we were able to catch this event right at the beginning, within one week of the black hole starting to feed on the star."

也就是说，这个喷流仍然非常明亮——如此明亮以至于天文学家计算出这个黑洞每年吞噬的质量大约是太阳的一半，帕沙姆说，并补充说，这个体积表明研究人员很早就发现了这个事件。“很多这种潮汐干扰发生在早期，我们能够在一开始就捕捉到这一事件，在黑洞开始吞噬恒星的一周内。”

The distance of this TDE from Earth isn't the only record-breaking aspect of AT2022cmc. Previously, jetted TDEs such as this one had only been spotted in high-energy types of radiation like gamma-rays and X-rays: This is the first time one of these violent star-killing events has been seen in optical light.

这个TDE距离地球的距离并不是AT2022cmc唯一打破记录的方面。此前，像这样的喷射TDEs只在高能辐射中被发现过，比如伽玛射线和x射线:这是第一次在光学中看到这些剧烈的灭星事件。

As such, the observation of AT2022cmc in optical light could open up a whole new way of detecting these jet-firing TDEs across the vastness of space, thus allowing for the deeper study of these rare events and the black holes that trigger them.

因此，在光学中观测AT2022cmc可以开辟一种全新的方式，在广阔的空间中探测这些喷射激发的TDEs，从而允许对这些罕见事件和触发它们的黑洞进行更深入的研究。

The research is described in two (opens in new tab) papers (opens in new tab) published on Wednesday (Nov. 30), in the journal Nature.

这项研究在周三(11月30日)发表在《自然》杂志上的两篇论文(在新标签中打开)中进行了描述。

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