The students, Ginevra Zaccagnini and Jackson Codd, worked with Ravi from 2018 to 2019, and by comparing radio observations years apart, they found that one object, J1533+2727, was fairly bright in the mid-1990s but that it had waned greatly by 2017.
Like detectives uncovering new leads in an old case, they searched the archives of the NRAO’s Green Bank 300-foot telescope and found that the object was even brighter in 1986 and 1987 (the Green Bank telescope collapsed). each other in 1988). Since its peak in the mid-1980s, the brightness of J1533+2727 had been reduced by a factor of 500.
Taken together, including new observations from the VLA, lead the researchers to believe that the new TDE occurred when a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 500 million light-years away crushed a star and then ejected a jet. at a speed approaching the speed of light.
This is called a relativistic jet, and so far there are three other TDEs associated with such jets. However, they have been found in galaxies more than 10 times further away.
“This is the first discovery of a relativistic TDE candidate in the relatively near universe, showing that these radio TDEs may be more common than we previously thought,” Ravi said.
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