A large mysterious black hole approximately 1,600 light-years away from our planet’s atmosphere was recently spotted shooting a bright beam of light directly in the direction of Earth. Announced to the public this Wednesday, November 30, 2022, Dr. Benjamin Gompertz, leader of the gamma-ray burst comparison analysis and assistant professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, released an official statement elaborating more specifically on the possible causes of the unexpected outer space event.
“Gamma-ray bursts are the usual suspects for events like this,” Gompertz publicly claimed. “However, as bright as they are, there is only so much light a collapsing star can produce, Because AT 2022cmc was so bright and lasted so long, we knew that something truly gargantuan must be powering it — a supermassive black hole.”
Postdoc at MIT’S Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research Matteo Lucchini also delivered a publicly educated opinion of his own on what the reasons for the light burst could be: “We know there is one supermassive black hole per galaxy, and they formed very quickly in the universe’s first million years… That tells us they feed very fast, though we do not know how that feeding process works. So, sources like a TDE can actually be a really good probe for how that process happens.”
Even with a handful of different professionally qualified individuals claiming that this occurrence was one of the rarest off-planet events to ever take place, it still leaves the same question as to what exactly is possible throughout the mass of space when considering that new affairs, like this, are still coming to light in 2022.