“ We have only seen a handful of these jetted-TDEs and they remain very exotic and poorly understood events,” says Nial Tanvir from the University of Leicester in the UK, who led the observations to determine the object’s distance with the VLT. In 1971, the black hole pioneer John Wheeler introduced the concept of jetted-TDEs as “ a tube of toothpaste gripped tight about its middle,” causing the system to “ squirt matter out of both ends.” Approximately 1% of these cause jets of plasma and radiation to be ejected from the poles of the rotating black hole. Stars that wander too close to a black hole are ripped apart by the incredible tidal forces of the black hole in what is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Because the jet is pointing almost towards us, this is also the first time it has been discovered with visible light, providing a new way of detecting these extreme events. The VLT determined it to be the furthest example of such an event to have ever been observed.
The VLT, together with other telescopes, was swiftly repositioned towards the source: a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy that had devoured a star, expelling the leftovers in a jet.
Earlier this year, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) was alerted after an unusual source of visible light had been detected by a survey telescope.
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