The British Journal Nature and Nature Astronomy recently published a paper reporting the observations of an extremely rare astronomical spectacle: a tidal disintegration event (TDE).

They also detected jets of matter "galloping" out of a black hole at nearly the speed of light.

A tidal disintegration event is a process by which a star releases energy when it is torn apart by a supermassive black hole. The discovery will improve understanding of the properties of black holes at cosmological distances.

TDE makes it possible to study how supermassive black holes grow by accumulating (or accreting) matter. When a star is rapidly pulled from the black hole, the star disintegrates and its material falls on the black hole's accretion disk.

In some cases, accreting matter produces intense jets of matter, and in rare cases, relativistic jets that travel at nearly the speed of light. But such events are very rare and little is known about them. And the latest observations have improved our understanding of such rare events.

A team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, report the detection of a signal called AT2022cmc: an astronomical event that releases enormous amounts of energy.

Observations from multiple telescopes using optical and other wavelengths show that the signal is consistent with radiation produced by bright jets released by stars that violently disintegrate when they get too close to a supermassive black hole.

These results, especially observations of X-ray wavelengths, show that extremely strong energies are involved, and the rapid changes in brightness and the persistence of the entire event are hallmarks of the rare relativistic jet TDE.

This is one of only four such events reported so far. Although most of the detected TDEs originated in the nearby universe, this event came from a distant galaxy about 12.4 billion light-years away. Visible from Earth because of its extraordinary brightness.

By simulating the event, MIT astronomers were more inclined to believe that a star about the size and mass of the Sun was disintegrated and swallowed by a relatively low-mass black hole.

The University of Maryland, College Park team concluded that their findings confirmed that about 1 percent of TDEs had relativistic jets, confirming previous predictions of how rare such events were.

A black hole is the most mysterious celestial body in the universe, and everything that comes close to it will be devoured by it. Fortunately, the closest black hole to Earth is a thousand light-years away.

Black holes are usually formed by stars dying and collapsing, so they are extremely massive. To form an ordinary black hole, you first need a star that is at least eight times the mass of the sun, which is why the sun will never become a black hole. Supermassive black holes naturally require greater mass. A supermassive black hole has a mass greater than ten billion times the mass of the sun. The black hole discovered in 2019 is the largest black hole discovered so far, with a mass 40 billion times that of the sun.

If a large black hole (or anything close to this size) comes close to Earth, then soon all people on Earth will die in a brutal way.

In addition to being destructive, black holes are also well known for their ability to warp the space-time around them. In fact, if we shared a planet with a regular, stellar black hole or a larger black hole, we would die instantly, unable to notice any unusual time dilation or attractive force distortion.

Time dilation can only be observed if you have an observer inside and outside the black hole, which is also impossible.