Plot Twist: Strange Flash of Light Was a Black Hole in the Night Sky

On the night of 11 February 2022, the Zwicky Transient Facility located at Palomar Observatory in California detected a strange flash of light in the sky. It sent out an alert about this unusual source of visible light. As many as 21 telescopes observed this unusual flash in various wavelengths, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the NICER X-ray instrument aboard the International Space Station.

After studying it for two more nights, the event was flagged as atypical because of its rapid rise and fall in luminosity. Astronomers reported the source to the Transient Name Server, which assigned it a formal name, AT2022cmc (A T 2022cmc). When they observed this source across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and analyzed the data, they realized they had witnessed an extremely rare cosmic event. The bright flash of light was emitted by a black hole eating a star halfway across the universe. The jet of stellar “leftovers” was blasted directly toward Earth, making it visible in the sky as a bright flash of light.

But how did astronomers find out that it was a black hole eating a star? What happened moments after the black hole disrupted the star? Finally, and most importantly, why was this discovery so important in astronomy?

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