💥 An energy beam billions of times more powerful than the Death Star's

What happens when a star ventures dangerously close to a supermassive black hole? This encounter produces a cataclysmic phenomenon: the star is literally torn apart by gravitational forces. Recently, astronomers have captured the aftermath of such a clash, which generated a jet of particles of exceptional power.

Named AT2018hyz, this episode occurred in a galaxy 665 million light-years away. After the star was consumed, the black hole propelled a jet moving at a speed approaching that of light.


To illustrate its intensity, scientists made a comparison with the Death Star, the fictional weapon from Star Wars capable of annihilating planets. The jet releases between one trillion and one hundred trillion times more energy than this cinematic construct. Any planet nearby would likely be pulverized.

The AT2018hyz event, although initially detected in 2018, remained quiet for several years. Its sudden awakening in the radio band in 2022 finally betrayed the presence of the jet.

This delay could be linked to the time required for the stellar debris to organize into a disk around the black hole. Then, magnetic fields channel some of this material into a narrow, ultrafast jet. Although this mechanism is still imperfectly understood, it is necessary to account for the colossal energy unleashed.

Today, the jet is gaining in scale and becoming more easily observable from our planet, which explains why its brightness keeps increasing. Such relativistic jets are extremely rare, emerging in barely 1% of recorded tidal disruption events.

Soon, instruments like the Square Kilometer Array should enable the detection of a greater number of these jets. This prospect will offer researchers new clues to understand the influence of black holes on galaxies and on the very structure of the cosmos.