Back in February, astronomers with theZwicky Transient Facilityin California spotted a brilliant flash of light.
The vivid flare, later named AT 2022cmc, sparked endless questions.
The human mind can barely comprehend such a quantity, let alone such a quantity of… suns.
What’s Doppler boosting?
Think about what happens as a car blasting music drives by your house.
Here’s an illustration showing what redshift basically does to the light coming from galaxies moving away from Earth.
It can catch those super-duper-stretched out wavelengths present in the deep, dark universe.
Typically, unnaturally bright bursts of light like this tend to stem from what’re known as gamma-ray bursts.
Because of their shimmering nature, these phenomena tend to populate the astronomy hall of fame.
It’s literally calledB.O.A.T– the brightest of all time.
In total, they represent more than 10 hours of observations.
But AT 2022cmc, after further speculation, was definitely not a gamma-ray burst.
“It was something extraordinary.”
It must be a tidal disruption event, pigmented by the Doppler effect.
It’s also the first TDE found using an optical sky survey.
“But we also saw some absorption of light by the galaxy where this event occurred.
In the meantime, researchers will continue to scan the sky for the exotic and poorly understood jetted TDE.
“We expect many more of these TDEs in the future,” Lucchini said.
