For the fourth time in human history, astronomers have observed a rare tidal collapse of a black hole.

Astronomers have recently observed a tidal disintegration event (Tidal Disruption Event, TDE), which is the fourth TDE event ever observed by mankind, citing foreign science and technology media Forbes. A supermassive black hole tore apart a star, creating a column of light close to the speed of light.

CTOnews.com learned that TDE is the way black holes grow, and its essence is to suck up nearby stars and devour and destroy them. When a star disintegrates, its matter falls into the disk of the black hole, and the disk expands slightly. What you can occasionally see is a powerful jet of luminous material at a speed close to the speed of light.

Such astronomical wonders are very rare, including only four cases observed in the long river of human history. Two related papers have been published this week in Nature and Nature Astronomy, and the observed event is named AT2022cmc.

CTOnews.com learned that AT2022cmc occurred on February 11, 2022, 12.4 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists were able to observe the event because of its amazing brightness, including the Zwiki transient Facility (ZTF) in California, the NASA-funded final ground impact warning system (ATLAS) survey of asteroids in Hawaii, the Karl-G-Jansky very large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope in New Mexico and the ESA large Telescope (Very Large Telescope) in Chile.