By Stephen Beech
A black hole dubbed “Jetty McJetface” is firing out energy beams up to 100 trillion times more powerful than the Death Star, say scientists.
The jets are far more potent than even the fictional moon-sized space station’s deadly laser capable of destroying entire planets in the Star Wars films, according to new research.
But the good news is that Earth is not in imminent danger.
An astrophysicist at the University of Oregon has been tracking the supermassive black hole with a case of cosmic indigestion.
Dr. Yvette Cendes says it has been “burping out” the remains of a shredded star for four years – and is still going strong.
She said the jet shooting out of the black hole is already a contender for one of the brightest, most energetic things ever detected in the universe.
Her research team has now collected enough data, published in the Astrophysical Journal, to predict that the stream of radio waves belching from the black hole will keep increasing exponentially before peaking in 2027.
Study leader Dr. Cendes said: “This is really unusual.
“I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything rising like this over such a long period of time.”
Scientists have documented several incidents where a star gets too close to a black hole and gets shredded by its gravitational field without going across the event horizon, or the point of no return.
It’s called a “tidal disruption event” because it’s caused by the same gravitational dynamics that create ocean tides on Earth.
Dr. Cendes explained that, in this case, the gravitational tug shreds a star in a process descriptively named “spaghettification.”
But she says a black hole emitting so much energy so many years after chewing up a star is “unprecedented”.
Dr. Cendes and her colleagues initially reported the discovery in a 2022 paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
They’ve kept monitoring it since, and it’s continued to surprise them.
The object’s official scientific name is AT2018hyz, although Dr Cendes prefers the nickname “Jetty McJetface” – in a nod to the British research vessel Boaty McBoatface.
In the latest paper, Dr. Cendes and her colleagues show that the energy emitted from the black hole has continued to rise sharply.
It’s now 50 times brighter than it was when originally detected in 2019.
Their calculations also suggest that the radiation from the star has been shooting out in one direction as a single jet.
Dr. Cendes says that could explain why it wasn’t initially detected, if the jet wasn’t aimed towards Earth.
But they won’t know for sure until the energy peaks in a few years.
Radio astronomer Dr. Cendes and her team use data collected at big radio telescopes in New Mexico and South Africa that measure radiation from around the universe at very high sensitivities.
They calculated the current energy outflow of the black hole and came up with an astounding number, putting it on a par with a gamma ray burst and potentially placing it among the most powerful single events ever detected in the universe.
Star Wars fans have done calculations of how much energy the infamous super-powerful Death Star would emit.
Dr. Cendes says the black hole is emitting at least a trillion times that, and possibly closer to 100 trillion times.
She said only time will tell how high it will go.
Her team is continuing to track the object to see whether their predictions play out.
Now, Dr. Cendes is on the hunt for other black holes that might also be exhibiting the phenomenon.
She says no one has ever seen anything like Jetty McJetface before, but that could be in part because nobody has really looked.
Dr. Cendes says securing time to gather data on international telescopes is competitive.
She added “If you have an explosion, why would you expect there to be something years after the explosion happened when you didn’t see something before?”
