Scientists have spotted the brightest flare yet from a supermassive black hole that shines with the light of 10 trillion suns.These bursts of light and energy can come from things like tangled-up magnetic fields or hiccups in the heated gas disks surrounding black holes. The flares help illuminate researchers’ understanding of the black holes within.The flare came from a supermassive black hole that’s 10 billion light years away, making the flash the most distant one observed so far. It hails from a time when the universe was rather young. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe latest cosmic display was spotted in 2018 by a camera at the Palomar Observatory in California. It took about three months to shine at peak brightness and has been decaying in the years since.It likely happened because a large star wandered too close to the black hole and got shredded to pieces.”At first, we didn’t really believe the numbers about the energy,” said study author Matthew Graham with the California Institute of Technology, which operates Palomar.This illustration provided by Caltech shows a supermassive black hole shredding a large star to pieces, leading to a bright flare. / Credit: Robert Hurt / APThe new findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. The immense pull of that black hole, which is surrounded by powerful magnetic fields, gives the Milky Way its characteristic swirl.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementScientists still aren’t sure how supermassive black holes form.Studying such behemoths can help researchers better understand the stellar neighborhood surrounding supermassive black holes. The discovery also allows scientists “to probe the interaction of supermassive black holes with their …
