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Farthest black hole to swallow a star detected for the first time in visible light

In about one percent of cases, the so-called jets, beams of plasma and radiation, from the poles of the rotating black hole. In 1971, black hole pioneer John Wheeler described the concept of a jet TDE as “a tube of toothpaste squeezed tightly in the middle, spewing matter out from both ends.

Since the jets are rare, they are not seen often and not much is known about them. “So far we’ve only seen a handful of these TDE jets, and they’re still very exotic and poorly understood occurrences,” said Nial Tanvir of Britain’s University of Leicester, who led the observations to measure the distance to determine the object with the VLT.

So astronomers are constantly looking for these extreme events, to find out exactly how jets form and why they occur in so few TDEs.

As part of this research, many telescopes regularly scan the sky for signs of short-lived, often extreme events, which can then be examined in greater detail by telescopes such as ESO’s VLT in Chile.

One such telescope is the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). This is a so-called survey telescope, a telescope that is not pointed at a specific object, but which constantly scans the night sky with an extremely wide-field camera. Every two nights, the ZTF scans the entire northern sky in visible light.

“We have developed an open-source data pipeline to store and gather key information from the ZTF survey, instantly alerting us if anything unusual emerges in the sky,” said Igor Andreoni, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, who co-led the study with Michael Coughlin of the University of Minnesota.

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