Astronomers have observed the most powerful and luminous black hole flare ever recorded, a cosmic explosion so bright it outshines 10 trillion Suns. The event came from a supermassive black hole known as J2245+3743, located about 10 billion light-years away and estimated to weigh around 500 million times the mass of the Sun, as reported by Space.com.
Around 2018, the black hole suddenly brightened by a factor of 40, becoming 30 times more powerful than any similar event seen before. The source of the explosion is what scientists call a tidal disruption event — a cosmic disaster that occurs when a star strays too close to a black hole and is violently ripped apart by its gravity.
When that happens, part of the star’s gas is ejected into space while the rest is pulled in, spiraling toward the black hole at near-light speeds. The intense heat from this process produces a brilliant flare that can be seen across billions of light-years.
In this case, the doomed star was unusually massive, about 30 times the mass of the Sun, which explains the unprecedented scale of the flare. The total energy released was roughly 10?? ergs — equivalent to converting the entire mass of the Sun into pure energy. That’s millions of times more powerful than a typical supernova.
The light from this explosion traveled 10 billion years to reach Earth, meaning it occurred when the universe was only a third of its current age. What makes the discovery even more intriguing is its location: the flare erupted inside an active galactic nucleus, a galaxy already glowing from a black hole feeding on surrounding gas.
“Stars this massive are rare,” said astronomer K. E. Saavik Ford of the City University of New York. “But in the dense gas disks of active galaxies, they can grow larger as material from the disk piles onto them.”
Astrophysicist Matthew Graham of Caltech added, “The energetics show this object is very far away and very bright. This is unlike any AGN we’ve ever seen.”
Tidal disruption events are difficult to detect within active galaxies because the existing light from their black holes often overshadows them. Even so, researchers found that this flare has been slowly fading for six years, though in its own frame of reference, due to time dilation, it likely lasted only about two.
This record-breaking event reveals that massive stars can form and die even in the harsh environments surrounding supermassive black holes. It also offers valuable clues about how black holes consume matter and shape their galaxies.
The discovery was made possible through long-term sky surveys like the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, which continuously scan the heavens for sudden cosmic outbursts — and in this case, caught one for the ages.