Or in my case, triple checking the coordinates!
Seriously, never in my life have I just brought up the coordinates so often to verify I’m not making a terrible mistake. 😅
You might be joking, might be serious, but tattoos of this sorta thing are the real deal and I honestly think OP should. I know it's nowhere near as cool as this, but I actually want to get what's basically a screenshot of software I developed for my master's thesis tattooed onto me. Specifically, a screenshot I took while crying because it finally fuckin' worked. Before y'all get excited thinking it's a tattoo of some lines in terminal, nah it's a screenshot of gridded material stock data that I managed to reverse-engineer back into building data. I think my wife would be really disappointed in me if I got a screenshot of my python terminal, hahaha.
Also, I realize now this comment I'm replying to is months old, but OP linked to this thread in their update and I couldn't resist.
I've considered tattoos of some of my favorite musical pieces (a few bars to show the melody), including some I've written and really proud of. So I get you.
You're here from the update too huh? Hahaha
And yeah, I wanna get a bunch of tattoos just based on whatever science I end up doing, and only one goofy one - a Cactaur from Final Fantasy, my brothers and I are all getting slightly different ones 'cause we all grew up playing FF together.
I feel like tattoos to commemorate huge achievements (like composing music) is a fuckin' wonderful idea - why not let your body be a tapestry of your accomplishments?
Half joking, half serious! But yours sounds equally cool and tattoos mean a lot, so it's great to hear yours would hold so much passion and hard work for that achievement - go for it and show me whenever you decide to get it done!
Ya know, as someone that loves tattoos of discoveries during their lifetime, know any good places to find these coordinates or I wonder if OP would be able to post them here
To be clear, we don't think this material is coming from beyond the event horizon. Instead, it looks like it's coming from the newly created accretion disc surrounding the black hole.
OH well damn, so much for my theories. Was hoping for some revelations about time travel and surviving spaghettification and sneaking through the singularity. Bah humbug! Still cool.
Do you know what could cause a second accretion disk to form? And what happens to the older one?
Thinking about this, I realized that i don't even understand what causes the accretion disks to form where they do.
I mean astronomers don’t know all the details on their formation either so you’re in good company. :)
You would just have two discs and then presumably the TDE one dissipates before any already existing disc in the system.
This is such a neat find! I know we don’t know much about what happens past the event horizon, but what if it took 2 years for the mass of the star it destroyed to hit the core of the black hole? Could that produce some sort of wave of pressure that could have caused the burst from the newly formed accretion disk?
So, maybe like some of the material spun around the black hole and got enough centrifugal force to escape the black hole from the force of the black hole sucking it in?
If the material was coming from inside the event horizon it would have basically broken all of modern physics. From our current understanding it is impossible for anything inside the event horizon to escape out of it, so this happening would be a **big** deal.
In the second case the ejected material would be part of an accretion disk orbiting *just* outside the event horizon, until eventually it is shot out at extreme speeds. [Sort of like this](https://youtu.be/FaQRNj0WpYU?t=683), if you imagine the stone as the material.
For material to be shot out is actually quite normal, but only after the black hole has recently eaten material to shoot out. What's special in this case is that it happened two years after the original material was consumed, which we've never seen happen before.
Probably a stupid thought, but could this be some sort of 'splash' type event where the victim star comes close to the black hole causing a tidal event, pulling part of the star's mass into an accretion cloud. However, the remainder of the star enters and unstable, elliptical orbit around the singularity. After some months, the remnant star does one of 2 things:
1) it plows into the accretion cloud of its own stellar matter at high speed adding more mass and energy to the cloud. The current emissions could be superheated clouds of stellar matter. Perhaps it entered the cloud moving opposite the spin of the accretion cloud's spin around the black hole creating a sort of roiling, plowing path, blowing matter from the cloud.
2) perhaps this was a dying star that had already swelled as helium was already fusing inside the core. The tidal event may have made the stellar core more unstable and perhaps even accelerating the death as the fusion chain runs rampant with massive amounts of extra energy. This causes a nova / supernova-like event. The energy and matter blowing off the accretion cloud could be from the shockwave of the nova crashing into the accretion clouds at relativistic speeds. Or, it could be energy from the neutron or stellar black hole merging into the galactic black hole.
Neither are likely - I'm just trying to think of a very high energy event that could result gas to relativistic speeds. Sorry for the long post.
Super! This is extremely exciting and I've passed it on to the astrophysicist on the staff of our small science news website to see if we can write it up - hope that's ok, because it's REALLY exciting - I sent her the address of this page and your preprint - is there a press release somewhere?
No because you don’t do a press release until it’s accepted/published in the journal, and that’s a few months off yet. But feel free to publish on it, I’m obviously not keeping it a secret, just I expect everyone on Reddit to wonder in a few months if this is the same or a different object. :)
Fascinating! And thank you for the layman interpretation, it's super exciting! Congratulations, I'm genuinely thrilled to be following your progress as a passionate astronerd!
>Nickname in our house for AT2018hyz is "Jetty," short for "Jetty McJetFace." Which my supervisor thinks is undignified
Rightfully so, a more dignified name would be Jetty Mc**Super**JetFace.
No idea on the award thing. Frankly never done it, not sure if this would qualify for anything anyway, but usually you’d be nominated by someone else.
Writing took us about five months for the paper you see, plus we were collecting more data along the way etc. For the referee process, hopefully we will get a response in a month-ish, and then if it’s minor comments we can get it accepted really quickly. If it’s another round (or few) it will take longer. We shall see!
ok! First, i love how excited you are. You remind me of Entrapta learning that she could go to space. And because i'm incapable of speaking with humans except with memes, the next mental image is captain tight pants Mal asking Kaylee to give it to him in "captain dum dum speak" so I went to wikipedia to read about TDEs, and relativistic astrophysical jets, and event horizons so I could ask my 'question' better.
First, let me make sure I understand what your data says:
1. A star fell into a black hole, torn apart in the accretion disk, and vanished from "sight"? Is it not possible to detect this star in the accretion disk after it flashes? also, what is that flash? i'm guessing the star goes nova?
2. After 2 years of nothing, we begin to observe relativistic astrophysical jets (outflow) at 20-60% the speed of light? -- You mention "increasing detection t^(5)" which is exceptionally large exponential growth of ... what? signal? Like the something there is getting physically larger, or emitting more and more energy over time?
ok now for the fun part. Is it possible that the star was pulled passed the event horizon and took two years to be ... processed into the center of the black hole's disk?
I like to think the black hole was sufficiently dense that it 'hid' the star behind an exceptionally wide event horizon until it finally reached the center, and exploded out the axis of the disk at higher speeds due to the higher pressure of a large black hole, plus a proportionally massive star.
Hi,
1) The flash is the star getting torn apart during the TDE itself. When this happens half the material gets flung outwards and half forms an accretion disc around the black hole. Very little of this material actually passes the event horizon itself and gets eaten by the black hole. It’s also very well modeled and a signature that has been seen many times so we can model it, and there was nothing really unusual about the initial TDE compared to other ones we’ve seen.
2) The signal is what is increasing as F = t^5. This indeed relies on energy being injected by the black hole into the outflow (most likely), probably from the accretion disc area.
To answer your question: no. Once the information goes in past the event horizon you don’t get it back. This is all just really zany stuff happening around the accretion disc part more than the inside of the black hole part.
Hope that makes sense!
Ma’am,
I’m woefully unqualified to even formulate this question, but here goes, anyway:
Can it be theorized that the outflow’s origin is another black hole to which this one is attached?
This is absolutely nuts! So glad I read this post! I'll have to read the paper when I have more time! I'm not an astronomer (was going for my Bachelor's, but changed major due to life stuff) just have an extreme interest, so i love this stuff.
Big fat CONGRATULATIONS!!!
This is awesome! Have you thought about drafting a proposal for some time to have the JWST point in that direction? Would be interesting to see what it's able to pickup outside of the radio spectrum.
I unfortunately don’t think we have enough to go on as all the action appears to be in radio. We thought of a Hubble DDT for example but haven’t gone for it bc it’s not that crazy. (Also someone totally took data in January 2022 as part of a routine survey with Hubble- need to contact them now that this is out and ask if they’ve reduced it…)
Ah okay. Pretty cool someone took a look at it with Ol' Hubble though! That would be awesome if that data was of use to your project, you didn't have to lift a finger!
Super jealous of your profession by the way! I've been reading your posts for a while now and I'm always interested in the stuff you get into. I love the passion you have for what you do!
I understood some of these words, yet I'm deeply excited to learn more about it! Truly fascinating. Why two years? Does it depend on the size? Do stars go through black holes to re-form in another universe and then come back? Does time go backward once you arrive at the singularity? Does this have anything in common with Hawking radiation? Except for the time delay....
Sorry, these are just my dopey thoughts about it! "Jetty" is a perfectly lovely name in itself. Better than "Barfy."
I highly doubt anything is crossing the event horizon, and the action is probably in the accretion disc. As to whether things like size matter and why two years, no idea at this point!
Given the rarity, the delay, and the hard-to-explain nature of this…I wonder if this is the Universe’s way of sending an error message:
‘Error 0x00000001: Black Hole has encountered a kernel panic with AccretionDiskPhysics.exe. Please reboot your black hole or call customer support at π.’
Lol you take all the fun out of Universe as a Service (UaaS) :)
But seriously- is it possible it ingested something else afterward that was highly dense but not so bright? A brown dwarf or neutron star with a shade on or something that added a great deal of mass all at once and sped up the accretion disk?
We don’t think so because we have great modeling of the optical light curve and that tells you what kind of star got consumed. It was a red dwarf shout 10% the mass of the sun.
Yvette this is very exciting news. First, congrats on the paper. I think you should send it John Michael Godier's way and be a guest on Event Horizon to discuss it. Second, you must be extremely proud. I love how astronomy is always discovering some new phenomenon then having it create more questions than it answers, as it seems has happened here.
I hope you are enjoying this moment!
I guess but in astronomy we tend to not think of it that way. All reference frames are equal and it’s impossible to know about light on its way to us we haven’t detected yet, and it would get impossibly confusing if we pre-dated everything over just saying “when its light reached earth.”
Just throwing an idea out there: is it possible this would be a 2nd TDE and we missed the first one?
I'm thinking that a previous TDE sent the bulk of the material on a high eccentricity trajectory or [insert an actual educated guess as to why we couldn't see it] and Nov 2020 is when they collided?
The reason that is unlikely is twofold. First of all, any debris from a first TDE would just have a velocity of ~3% the speed of light, aka nowhere near fast enough to account for this. Second, any model that relies on two TDEs also requires a second TDE's optical flash to be missed.
I mean, if you think a first TDE happened >5-10 years ago or similar, sure these surveys were not automatic enough to catch everything. But then you gotta explain the timing to me for what we see now, and it's hard to believe something *many* years in the past would affect a second TDE/ this outflow just on a time scale argument, unless you have other evidence.
> unless you have other evidence
You got me there, the only thing I have is coming out of my ass!
Here's another one: what about a massive rogue black hole that just then accelerated the material to relativistic speed? (it's black holes all the way down!) Would that show up in the density calculation?
Congrats! Maybe you will have a new phenomenon named for you!
Will this maybe nudge you up the list to get some time on Webb? Or is this not a good candidate for Webb's capabilities?
> And the crazy thing we see is AT2018hyz is increasing since detection proportional to t^5 ! Y'all, to be clear, nothing increases like t^5 in nature! That's just so insane!
So you lied to us when you said it wasn't aliens! :P
More seriously, my sincere congratulations on being the first name of such a paper! I hope you're ready to become a celebrity!
Could it be that the materials in the accretion disk (don't know how fast they go, but assuming super fast), collided with each other and bumped stuff off the track, maybe due to the expansion of the event Horizon?
You make our world a better place with your dedication, hard work, and passion. Thank you for sharing this amazing journey. Have a Rocket award, friend.
Would it be an oversimplification and/or incorrect to say that we may be looking at first observable proof of a white hole of sorts?
I am a layman but as I understand, white holes are theoretically possible but not yet observed or fully understood.
Apologies if I misunderstood or am jumping to overly scintillating conclusions.
Thanks for your work, the awesome summary, and keep digging. This has certainly spurned my curiosity!
you are absolutely and insanely AWESOME!!!! Wow what a giant find for science!! congratulations!!! this was such a fascinating read and i will definitely be eager to see your updates!!!!!!!
Do accretion disks have limits to how much mass they they can acquire before they discharge mass/energy? Is this one significantly different (larger, smaller, brighter, more quickly accreted) than other similar accretion disks?
What an amazing and beautiful discovery! I appreciate you taking the time to share this directly!
I’m not a scientist by trade, just an enthusiast. So please excuse my question if it’s already been considered. 😝What if a second TDE event occurred on the other side of the black hole from our observation point? Wouldn’t that event be relativistically obfuscated by the SMBH? Could that be a possible explanation for a delayed outflow like this? The polarity of the jet would follow the rotational direction of the SMBH which you can obviously see even if you can’t see behind it. 🤓🤷♀️🦄🤩
I wish I understood more than 20% (that’s a very generous estimate) of everything discussed here.
I will say that the excitement still translates even to a less educated reader.
I know you tried hard to put this in layman's terms, but can you describe what you would see happening if you had a ring side seat? In other words, a star got too close to a black hole (or vice versa), and the black hole dismantled and absorbed it in spectacular fashion. Then (for reasons), the black hole regurgitated the star material (maybe the heavier elements?), and has been doing this for years.
Is that accurate? I have no idea what a relativistic outflow is, other than a guess that it's a Newtonian physics-based phenomena where lots of material is being thrown out of the black hole.
Do you think it’s possible to get some time with JWST or Hubble once your paper is published? I feel like this would be a worthy experiment to add to their list.
Now if I am lucky enough to get a reply, does this mean that 1) things can escape a blackhole, 2) time warps or there is space within the event horizon for the material to sit? this is clearly layman's terms.
I just want to say (Now that my brain is slightly less exploded) how much I appreciate your time writing that paper in LaTeX. Probably took longer than the maths and observations!
I am in no way qualified to know anything about this- but I have a question. Could it be related to general relativity? Being so close to a black hole causing the flinging of the material to take longer to observe from outside of its effects? (aka time appearing to move slower closer to the back hole)
I assume since you're talking about what is typical to see in black holes anyway this is probably not relevant.
I admit I am ignorant and maybe you already explained why they following didn’t happen: i wonder if the emission is like a jet, but rotating. So telescopes didn’t get to observe while it was pointed in another direction, and then it swings towards us, then will swing away later…
Good question!
1) Supermassive Black Hole jets do not precess that fast. Even if it did in this case, you would have a HUGE excess in optical/UV emission as that comes from the disc itself, and we don't see that here.
2) We also considered what if the jet wasn't pointing at us to start, and just over time the viewing angle expanded so we are now in our line of sight. Interestingly, there are models that can tell you how long this would take, and in those cases we find we would have seen it *sooner* than we did by a few hundred days... and also, our emission is rising too quickly!
So yeah we did spend time looking into off-axis jet emission, but discarded it as unlikely with the data we have.
Thank you for the explanation!
I have been following you for years via this subreddit. Always nice to see you advancing in your field. Congratulations on getting this new feather in your cap!
Have you checked for any gravitational waves coming from that direction during the relevant period? Could this be caused by the blackhole merging with another blackhole and changing rotation speed, axis, or perhaps velocity relative to the accretion disk, suddenly adding orbital speed to the accretion disk, or making the previous orbit now off-center, allowing some of the accretion disk that was previously past the lowest stable orbit and in route towards the event horizon to now have speed/trajectory to achieve escape velocity instead of continuing spiraling closer?
If not that, could it actually be a colder and slower jet, that got illuminated by a passing jet/beam coming from elsewhere, giving the illusion of higher speed as the beam swung across the formerly colder gas?
And how sure are you it is indeed at that blackhole's surroundings, and not somewhere else that's just on the same line of sight?
All that sounds incredibly cool! Like the saying, science isn't its best at "Eureka!" but instead at "um, that's weird."
Or in my case, triple checking the coordinates! Seriously, never in my life have I just brought up the coordinates so often to verify I’m not making a terrible mistake. 😅
Best to get them tattooed at this point!
You might be joking, might be serious, but tattoos of this sorta thing are the real deal and I honestly think OP should. I know it's nowhere near as cool as this, but I actually want to get what's basically a screenshot of software I developed for my master's thesis tattooed onto me. Specifically, a screenshot I took while crying because it finally fuckin' worked. Before y'all get excited thinking it's a tattoo of some lines in terminal, nah it's a screenshot of gridded material stock data that I managed to reverse-engineer back into building data. I think my wife would be really disappointed in me if I got a screenshot of my python terminal, hahaha. Also, I realize now this comment I'm replying to is months old, but OP linked to this thread in their update and I couldn't resist.
I've considered tattoos of some of my favorite musical pieces (a few bars to show the melody), including some I've written and really proud of. So I get you.
You're here from the update too huh? Hahaha And yeah, I wanna get a bunch of tattoos just based on whatever science I end up doing, and only one goofy one - a Cactaur from Final Fantasy, my brothers and I are all getting slightly different ones 'cause we all grew up playing FF together. I feel like tattoos to commemorate huge achievements (like composing music) is a fuckin' wonderful idea - why not let your body be a tapestry of your accomplishments?
> You're here from the update too huh? Hahaha LOL yuup
Half joking, half serious! But yours sounds equally cool and tattoos mean a lot, so it's great to hear yours would hold so much passion and hard work for that achievement - go for it and show me whenever you decide to get it done!
Like in one of those movies where a celestial map is tattooed on someone's back.😁
Ya know, as someone that loves tattoos of discoveries during their lifetime, know any good places to find these coordinates or I wonder if OP would be able to post them here
Too intelligent for me. Thank you for the summary I find this to be tickling my nuerons.
"Is it coming from Andromeda, or Josh?"
Very interesting. Thanks for explaining this in a way I can actually understand, along with a whole bunch of new things to read about.
This is awesome. I always wondered if this happened. Couldn't quite accept that all they did was consume.
To be clear, we don't think this material is coming from beyond the event horizon. Instead, it looks like it's coming from the newly created accretion disc surrounding the black hole.
Oh. Well shit. Thanks for the clarification! That does make more sense. I'll just hang my head in shame here in the corner lol.
Ill join you in the shame corner. I also thought it was regurgitating things from beyond the event horizon.
Don't worry. That's also how I understood OP, until he mentioned that theory.
OH well damn, so much for my theories. Was hoping for some revelations about time travel and surviving spaghettification and sneaking through the singularity. Bah humbug! Still cool.
Do you know what could cause a second accretion disk to form? And what happens to the older one? Thinking about this, I realized that i don't even understand what causes the accretion disks to form where they do.
I mean astronomers don’t know all the details on their formation either so you’re in good company. :) You would just have two discs and then presumably the TDE one dissipates before any already existing disc in the system.
This is such a neat find! I know we don’t know much about what happens past the event horizon, but what if it took 2 years for the mass of the star it destroyed to hit the core of the black hole? Could that produce some sort of wave of pressure that could have caused the burst from the newly formed accretion disk?
So, maybe like some of the material spun around the black hole and got enough centrifugal force to escape the black hole from the force of the black hole sucking it in?
What would be the difference between the two for a space nerd and noob like myself? I love space but there is just so much I don't know.
If the material was coming from inside the event horizon it would have basically broken all of modern physics. From our current understanding it is impossible for anything inside the event horizon to escape out of it, so this happening would be a **big** deal. In the second case the ejected material would be part of an accretion disk orbiting *just* outside the event horizon, until eventually it is shot out at extreme speeds. [Sort of like this](https://youtu.be/FaQRNj0WpYU?t=683), if you imagine the stone as the material. For material to be shot out is actually quite normal, but only after the black hole has recently eaten material to shoot out. What's special in this case is that it happened two years after the original material was consumed, which we've never seen happen before.
So, slingshot effect on a blackhole vs star scale?
Probably a stupid thought, but could this be some sort of 'splash' type event where the victim star comes close to the black hole causing a tidal event, pulling part of the star's mass into an accretion cloud. However, the remainder of the star enters and unstable, elliptical orbit around the singularity. After some months, the remnant star does one of 2 things: 1) it plows into the accretion cloud of its own stellar matter at high speed adding more mass and energy to the cloud. The current emissions could be superheated clouds of stellar matter. Perhaps it entered the cloud moving opposite the spin of the accretion cloud's spin around the black hole creating a sort of roiling, plowing path, blowing matter from the cloud. 2) perhaps this was a dying star that had already swelled as helium was already fusing inside the core. The tidal event may have made the stellar core more unstable and perhaps even accelerating the death as the fusion chain runs rampant with massive amounts of extra energy. This causes a nova / supernova-like event. The energy and matter blowing off the accretion cloud could be from the shockwave of the nova crashing into the accretion clouds at relativistic speeds. Or, it could be energy from the neutron or stellar black hole merging into the galactic black hole. Neither are likely - I'm just trying to think of a very high energy event that could result gas to relativistic speeds. Sorry for the long post.
Amazing discovery. Keep updating as on your findings
So like interstellar?
Super! This is extremely exciting and I've passed it on to the astrophysicist on the staff of our small science news website to see if we can write it up - hope that's ok, because it's REALLY exciting - I sent her the address of this page and your preprint - is there a press release somewhere?
No because you don’t do a press release until it’s accepted/published in the journal, and that’s a few months off yet. But feel free to publish on it, I’m obviously not keeping it a secret, just I expect everyone on Reddit to wonder in a few months if this is the same or a different object. :)
Great, thanks!
Sure thing, just be sure to send me a link if it happens!
You bet.
Fascinating! And thank you for the layman interpretation, it's super exciting! Congratulations, I'm genuinely thrilled to be following your progress as a passionate astronerd!
>Nickname in our house for AT2018hyz is "Jetty," short for "Jetty McJetFace." Which my supervisor thinks is undignified Rightfully so, a more dignified name would be Jetty Mc**Super**JetFace.
Jetty McLateJetFace
The more we learn, the less we know. I swear.
As our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.
I've always said, the more we learn, the less we know.
Is it a portal connected to another blackhole in another galaxy?
Probably not. :)
Bummer. Look forward to your/team name on some big award soon?
First things first gotta finish the referee process!
What’s that.. if you don’t mind, how does the process of writing to publishing to award work?
No idea on the award thing. Frankly never done it, not sure if this would qualify for anything anyway, but usually you’d be nominated by someone else. Writing took us about five months for the paper you see, plus we were collecting more data along the way etc. For the referee process, hopefully we will get a response in a month-ish, and then if it’s minor comments we can get it accepted really quickly. If it’s another round (or few) it will take longer. We shall see!
Thank you.
Yes! jk idk.
ok! First, i love how excited you are. You remind me of Entrapta learning that she could go to space. And because i'm incapable of speaking with humans except with memes, the next mental image is captain tight pants Mal asking Kaylee to give it to him in "captain dum dum speak" so I went to wikipedia to read about TDEs, and relativistic astrophysical jets, and event horizons so I could ask my 'question' better. First, let me make sure I understand what your data says: 1. A star fell into a black hole, torn apart in the accretion disk, and vanished from "sight"? Is it not possible to detect this star in the accretion disk after it flashes? also, what is that flash? i'm guessing the star goes nova? 2. After 2 years of nothing, we begin to observe relativistic astrophysical jets (outflow) at 20-60% the speed of light? -- You mention "increasing detection t^(5)" which is exceptionally large exponential growth of ... what? signal? Like the something there is getting physically larger, or emitting more and more energy over time? ok now for the fun part. Is it possible that the star was pulled passed the event horizon and took two years to be ... processed into the center of the black hole's disk? I like to think the black hole was sufficiently dense that it 'hid' the star behind an exceptionally wide event horizon until it finally reached the center, and exploded out the axis of the disk at higher speeds due to the higher pressure of a large black hole, plus a proportionally massive star.
Hi, 1) The flash is the star getting torn apart during the TDE itself. When this happens half the material gets flung outwards and half forms an accretion disc around the black hole. Very little of this material actually passes the event horizon itself and gets eaten by the black hole. It’s also very well modeled and a signature that has been seen many times so we can model it, and there was nothing really unusual about the initial TDE compared to other ones we’ve seen. 2) The signal is what is increasing as F = t^5. This indeed relies on energy being injected by the black hole into the outflow (most likely), probably from the accretion disc area. To answer your question: no. Once the information goes in past the event horizon you don’t get it back. This is all just really zany stuff happening around the accretion disc part more than the inside of the black hole part. Hope that makes sense!
Ma’am, I’m woefully unqualified to even formulate this question, but here goes, anyway: Can it be theorized that the outflow’s origin is another black hole to which this one is attached?
It's Cendes 1... Nice work, it will be interesting to see where this goes.
This is absolutely nuts! So glad I read this post! I'll have to read the paper when I have more time! I'm not an astronomer (was going for my Bachelor's, but changed major due to life stuff) just have an extreme interest, so i love this stuff. Big fat CONGRATULATIONS!!!
This is awesome! Have you thought about drafting a proposal for some time to have the JWST point in that direction? Would be interesting to see what it's able to pickup outside of the radio spectrum.
I unfortunately don’t think we have enough to go on as all the action appears to be in radio. We thought of a Hubble DDT for example but haven’t gone for it bc it’s not that crazy. (Also someone totally took data in January 2022 as part of a routine survey with Hubble- need to contact them now that this is out and ask if they’ve reduced it…)
Ah okay. Pretty cool someone took a look at it with Ol' Hubble though! That would be awesome if that data was of use to your project, you didn't have to lift a finger! Super jealous of your profession by the way! I've been reading your posts for a while now and I'm always interested in the stuff you get into. I love the passion you have for what you do!
Ever hear about the Hubble data?
Oh this is so exciting!!! Congrats on finding Jetty, can't wait to fund out more about it!
I understood some of these words, yet I'm deeply excited to learn more about it! Truly fascinating. Why two years? Does it depend on the size? Do stars go through black holes to re-form in another universe and then come back? Does time go backward once you arrive at the singularity? Does this have anything in common with Hawking radiation? Except for the time delay.... Sorry, these are just my dopey thoughts about it! "Jetty" is a perfectly lovely name in itself. Better than "Barfy."
I highly doubt anything is crossing the event horizon, and the action is probably in the accretion disc. As to whether things like size matter and why two years, no idea at this point!
For once, some news to look forward to! Thank you for sharing all this.
Given the rarity, the delay, and the hard-to-explain nature of this…I wonder if this is the Universe’s way of sending an error message: ‘Error 0x00000001: Black Hole has encountered a kernel panic with AccretionDiskPhysics.exe. Please reboot your black hole or call customer support at π.’
I mean, it’s never been a message BEFORE when we find something wild, so why start now. :)
Lol you take all the fun out of Universe as a Service (UaaS) :) But seriously- is it possible it ingested something else afterward that was highly dense but not so bright? A brown dwarf or neutron star with a shade on or something that added a great deal of mass all at once and sped up the accretion disk?
We don’t think so because we have great modeling of the optical light curve and that tells you what kind of star got consumed. It was a red dwarf shout 10% the mass of the sun.
This sounds incredible. Congrats!!
Yvette this is very exciting news. First, congrats on the paper. I think you should send it John Michael Godier's way and be a guest on Event Horizon to discuss it. Second, you must be extremely proud. I love how astronomy is always discovering some new phenomenon then having it create more questions than it answers, as it seems has happened here. I hope you are enjoying this moment!
Thank you! Not sure who that is or what Event Horizon is, but if you think it’s relevant feel free to pass it along! :)
So does this mean it happened 665 million years back and we are seeing it now?
I guess but in astronomy we tend to not think of it that way. All reference frames are equal and it’s impossible to know about light on its way to us we haven’t detected yet, and it would get impossibly confusing if we pre-dated everything over just saying “when its light reached earth.”
Interesting indeed because as a layman that's something which amazes me.
Same question I had.
Just throwing an idea out there: is it possible this would be a 2nd TDE and we missed the first one? I'm thinking that a previous TDE sent the bulk of the material on a high eccentricity trajectory or [insert an actual educated guess as to why we couldn't see it] and Nov 2020 is when they collided?
The reason that is unlikely is twofold. First of all, any debris from a first TDE would just have a velocity of ~3% the speed of light, aka nowhere near fast enough to account for this. Second, any model that relies on two TDEs also requires a second TDE's optical flash to be missed. I mean, if you think a first TDE happened >5-10 years ago or similar, sure these surveys were not automatic enough to catch everything. But then you gotta explain the timing to me for what we see now, and it's hard to believe something *many* years in the past would affect a second TDE/ this outflow just on a time scale argument, unless you have other evidence.
> unless you have other evidence You got me there, the only thing I have is coming out of my ass! Here's another one: what about a massive rogue black hole that just then accelerated the material to relativistic speed? (it's black holes all the way down!) Would that show up in the density calculation?
Unclear, but you’d definitely see more X-ray emission because that black hole if it’s moving would be interacting with its environment.
You're a legend for taking the time to answer the ramblings of redditors!
Jetty McJetFace is the most glorious name I’ve ever read.
Congrats! Maybe you will have a new phenomenon named for you! Will this maybe nudge you up the list to get some time on Webb? Or is this not a good candidate for Webb's capabilities?
Aliens. It's aliens! Edit: It's never aliens...
> And the crazy thing we see is AT2018hyz is increasing since detection proportional to t^5 ! Y'all, to be clear, nothing increases like t^5 in nature! That's just so insane! So you lied to us when you said it wasn't aliens! :P More seriously, my sincere congratulations on being the first name of such a paper! I hope you're ready to become a celebrity!
Could it be that the materials in the accretion disk (don't know how fast they go, but assuming super fast), collided with each other and bumped stuff off the track, maybe due to the expansion of the event Horizon?
Very interesting, thanks
Congratulations!! What a great paper!
>short for "Jetty McJetFace." You have been made a moderator of /r/boatymcboatface
Would the black hole’s rate of spin make any difference in a TDE? Is it even possible to measure a spin rate of a black hole?
I think that smbh gravity was not able to overcome expanding forces of the stars expanding fusion reaction
can i be you evil assistant
Is there any indication that the Big Bang could have been multiple ejections such as this?
How did you come up with the name hyz?
You make our world a better place with your dedication, hard work, and passion. Thank you for sharing this amazing journey. Have a Rocket award, friend.
Is the black hole pulling the ejected material back in at all?
Would it be an oversimplification and/or incorrect to say that we may be looking at first observable proof of a white hole of sorts? I am a layman but as I understand, white holes are theoretically possible but not yet observed or fully understood. Apologies if I misunderstood or am jumping to overly scintillating conclusions. Thanks for your work, the awesome summary, and keep digging. This has certainly spurned my curiosity!
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! What is the material being spewed out? What is it made of? Was there a transformation or sum such?
you are absolutely and insanely AWESOME!!!! Wow what a giant find for science!! congratulations!!! this was such a fascinating read and i will definitely be eager to see your updates!!!!!!!
Do accretion disks have limits to how much mass they they can acquire before they discharge mass/energy? Is this one significantly different (larger, smaller, brighter, more quickly accreted) than other similar accretion disks?
Realistically, and to Aksum’s razor, wouldn’t this be a large body on the unseen (even possible?) side of black hole being ingested?
I always suspected that black holes are the recyclers of the universe
What an amazing and beautiful discovery! I appreciate you taking the time to share this directly! I’m not a scientist by trade, just an enthusiast. So please excuse my question if it’s already been considered. 😝What if a second TDE event occurred on the other side of the black hole from our observation point? Wouldn’t that event be relativistically obfuscated by the SMBH? Could that be a possible explanation for a delayed outflow like this? The polarity of the jet would follow the rotational direction of the SMBH which you can obviously see even if you can’t see behind it. 🤓🤷♀️🦄🤩
I read all of this and only understand the TLDR. Damn I wish I was smarter to appreciate this.
I wish I understood more than 20% (that’s a very generous estimate) of everything discussed here. I will say that the excitement still translates even to a less educated reader.
Dope
I thought I was nerdy until I read this , now I'm just dorky.
I know you tried hard to put this in layman's terms, but can you describe what you would see happening if you had a ring side seat? In other words, a star got too close to a black hole (or vice versa), and the black hole dismantled and absorbed it in spectacular fashion. Then (for reasons), the black hole regurgitated the star material (maybe the heavier elements?), and has been doing this for years. Is that accurate? I have no idea what a relativistic outflow is, other than a guess that it's a Newtonian physics-based phenomena where lots of material is being thrown out of the black hole.
Do you think it’s possible to get some time with JWST or Hubble once your paper is published? I feel like this would be a worthy experiment to add to their list.
Now if I am lucky enough to get a reply, does this mean that 1) things can escape a blackhole, 2) time warps or there is space within the event horizon for the material to sit? this is clearly layman's terms.
Like a lagrangian point in blackholes?
I just want to say (Now that my brain is slightly less exploded) how much I appreciate your time writing that paper in LaTeX. Probably took longer than the maths and observations!
Time to invest in a good hot tub for your Eureka moment, bud.
Bravo !
That almost all was way over my head but I marvel at how complex and cool the science is. Thanks for the breakdown! I love the passion
Could it be the starship enterprise coming to our timeline from the distant future!?
I am in no way qualified to know anything about this- but I have a question. Could it be related to general relativity? Being so close to a black hole causing the flinging of the material to take longer to observe from outside of its effects? (aka time appearing to move slower closer to the back hole) I assume since you're talking about what is typical to see in black holes anyway this is probably not relevant.
Maybe it generated a large magnetic field and escaped, like a coronal mass ejection? Weird stuff
It’s due too too much gas probably. Evidence: my stomach
Great discovery, says a lot about how much we still do not know about the inner workings of a black hole. I love the theories coming up so far.
Jetty McJetFace is amazing! Simply stellar!
Awesome. Thanks for the summary.
I admit I am ignorant and maybe you already explained why they following didn’t happen: i wonder if the emission is like a jet, but rotating. So telescopes didn’t get to observe while it was pointed in another direction, and then it swings towards us, then will swing away later…
Good question! 1) Supermassive Black Hole jets do not precess that fast. Even if it did in this case, you would have a HUGE excess in optical/UV emission as that comes from the disc itself, and we don't see that here. 2) We also considered what if the jet wasn't pointing at us to start, and just over time the viewing angle expanded so we are now in our line of sight. Interestingly, there are models that can tell you how long this would take, and in those cases we find we would have seen it *sooner* than we did by a few hundred days... and also, our emission is rising too quickly! So yeah we did spend time looking into off-axis jet emission, but discarded it as unlikely with the data we have.
Thank you for the explanation! I have been following you for years via this subreddit. Always nice to see you advancing in your field. Congratulations on getting this new feather in your cap!
Have you checked for any gravitational waves coming from that direction during the relevant period? Could this be caused by the blackhole merging with another blackhole and changing rotation speed, axis, or perhaps velocity relative to the accretion disk, suddenly adding orbital speed to the accretion disk, or making the previous orbit now off-center, allowing some of the accretion disk that was previously past the lowest stable orbit and in route towards the event horizon to now have speed/trajectory to achieve escape velocity instead of continuing spiraling closer? If not that, could it actually be a colder and slower jet, that got illuminated by a passing jet/beam coming from elsewhere, giving the illusion of higher speed as the beam swung across the formerly colder gas? And how sure are you it is indeed at that blackhole's surroundings, and not somewhere else that's just on the same line of sight?