It can be challenging for us humans to wrap our brains around really big races. Even the estimate of a million or a billion is too difficult for most people to really understand. So get ready to think big, because scientists have recorded the largest and longest black flare ever seen, and the numbers around it are pretty amazing.
This event took place in an active galactic nucleus, also known as accreting or feeding a black hole, that is predicted to be 500 times more massive than our sun and lasts for 10 billion years. Investigators suspect that this flare is caused by a water disruption event, where the AGN’s gravitational pull is likely to close and dissipate. The team estimates that the star that was consumed by the black hole was 30 times the mass of our solar system. And according to a layperson blog post from Caltech about the event, “at its brightest, the event shone with 10 trillion sunlight.”
“This is unlike any AGN we’ve ever seen,” he was principal investigator on the study and Astronomy Research Professor at Caltech and the Sky Project for the Black Translity Support. Research about the agn and its flare bonuses appeared in the journal Natural environment.
