Astronomers have spotted the largest and most distant flare ever observed from a supermassive black hole. Nicknamed “Superman,” the flare originated 10 billion light-years from Earth, and at its peak, the light emitted shone with the brightness of 10 trillion suns.The source of the flare is an active galactic nucleus, or AGN — a bright, compact region at the center of a galaxy — and it’s powered by a supermassive black hole that is actively feeding on material. Gas and dust fall into a rotating disk around the black hole, and as the debris spirals more rapidly, it becomes superheated, releasing intense radiation.Researchers pondered what the gargantuan black hole consumed to release such a powerful flare. They concluded it likely gobbled up a massive star that would have otherwise been destined to end its life by exploding.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“About 1 in 10,000 AGN show some sort of flaring activity but this is so extreme that it puts it into its own category (which is roughly a 1 in a million event),” Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, said in an email. Graham is the lead author of a study about the unprecedented phenomenon that published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.The flare suggests there are unknown populations of giant stars near the centers of large galaxies, which also host supermassive black holes — and sheds light on the complicated interactions between two behemoths.A massive stellar feastSuperman was first detected by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey and the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observator …
