Astronomers have detected an act of extreme violence more than halfway across the known universe as a black hole shreds a star that wandered too close to this celestial savage. But this was no ordinary instance of a ravenous black hole.
The culprit appears to be a supermassive black hole believed to be hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun located roughly 8.5 billion light years away from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles .
The event was detected in February through the Zwicky Transient Facility astronomical survey using a camera attached to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The distance was calculated using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Andreoni and Coughlin said the black hole was likely spinning rapidly, which might help explain how the two powerful jets were launched into space at almost the speed of light.
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