Astronomers have broken two records at once by spotting the largest and the most distant flare ever seen, coming from a supermassive black hole 10 billion lightyears away.
Appropriately dubbed ‘Superman’, the flare shines with the power of 10 trillion Suns and is thought to result from a supermassive black hole consuming a massive star.
First detected in 2018, the flare was initially dismissed as unremarkable.
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The dome of the P48 telescope, where the Zwicky Transient Facility operates. Credit: Zwicky Transient Facility
It was found by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California, which uses a widefield camera to scan the sky for short-lived cosmic phenomena such as flaring supernovae.
However, in 2023, a team of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology noticed that the flare was still surprisingly bright five years later.
Using the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they confirmed the flare was much more distant than thought: 10 billion lightyears away.
To be so bright over such a distance meant it had to be extraordinarily energetic.
They found that the Superman flare peaked at a brightness 30 times more luminous than any other known black hole flare to date, and that the doomed star being torn to bits by the black hole is enormous – at least 30 times the mass of our Sun.
The researchers believe the discovery means there are likely to be many similar flares occurring across the Universe.
They plan to comb through more ZTF data to find them, so the Superman flare may not be a record holder for long.