So Mattila, Pérez-Torres and 34 additional collaborators organized an international campaign using a global network of radio telescopes to obtain high-resolution radio images of the source, patiently, periodically monitoring its size and shape in search of a jet. Ramming into the diffuse gas of the interstellar medium, the jets would produce copious radio waves potentially visible from Earth. There is no mistaking, however, the other signature of a TDE: twin jets of star stuff ejected from near the black hole at nearly light-speed by intense magnetic fields twisting and breaking like rubber bands. In a TDE roughly half of the ripped-up star is flung away from the black hole whereas the other half plunges to its doom, piling up around the hole’s maw in a whirling disk of glowing debris that can be mistaken for a supernova. That suggested the source was not a supernova at all, but rather a tidal disruption event (TDE), a star being torn apart by a supermassive black hole. But follow-up infrared observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope showed the source was far too bright to be a supernova, blazing with light that would outshine a typical small galaxy by several 100-fold.
These cataclysmic stellar explosions are particularly bright in visible light and in x-rays-except in Arp 299’s murky center most of that light would be absorbed by dust and reradiated in the infrared the remnant would then leak out as radio waves. And a supernova was, at first, exactly what they thought they found.
That July another team led by Pérez-Torres reanalyzing previously gathered data confirmed a bright source of radio waves from the same location.īoth had been hunting for supernovae in the vicinity of Arp 299’s colliding galactic cores, a dust-shrouded region filled with clouds of gas and newborn massive stars generated by the ongoing merger. The discovery’s first inklings emerged in January 2005, when a team led by astronomer Seppo Mattila of the University of Turku in Finland detected a brilliant pointlike source of infrared light from within Arp 299, a pair of merging galaxies some 150 million light-years from Earth.
“Never before have we been able to directly observe the formation and evolution of a jet from one of these events,” says study co-author Miguel Pérez-Torres of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. The results were published in the June 14 edition of Science, and could help researchers better understand how black holes grow and influence their galactic surroundings. Marshaling a decade’s worth of data from telescopes around the world, scientists have captured new details of a gargantuan black hole feasting on a hapless star, watching as the black hole consumed its prey and burped out a jet of material moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.