Stars

Artist's representation of the AT2022cmc event (Image ESO/M.Kornmesser)

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Two articles, one published in the journal “Nature” and one in the journal “Nature Astronomy”, report different aspects of the study of the most distant supermassive black hole discovered as it devours a star and then emits a jet of materials accelerated at speeds close to the speed of light. The event, cataloged as AT2022cmc, is somewhat similar to a gamma-ray burst but was detected in various electromagnetic bands thanks to the fact that it’s aimed almost exactly at Earth. This is the first event of its kind detected in visible light, so it can offer new insights into the behavior of truly extreme objects during the destruction of a star that got too close to them.

The supernova remnants DEM L 190 (Image ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kulkarni, Y. Chu)

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An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope portrays the supernova remnants cataloged as DEM L 190 or LMC N49 or by other designations observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The debris produced by the explosion of a massive star formed what appear from Earth as delicate colored filaments. Those materials projected into interstellar space could end up in other stellar systems, perhaps even in protoplanetary disks which will be enriched by the elements generated by the progenitor star and by the supernova.

Arp-Madore 417-391, or simply AM 417-391, with other galaxies and stars

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An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s ACS instrument shows Arp-Madore 417-391, or simply AM 417-391, a pair of merging galaxies. It’s part of the Arp-Madore catalog, which collects particularly peculiar galaxies in the southern sky. It includes pairs of galaxies interacting at levels that go up to a merger just like AM 417-391.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument is optimized for hunting galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient universe. The AM 417-391 pair is “only” 670 million light-years away and makes an excellent object of study for astronomers interested in galaxy mergers.

The star getting destroyed in the AT 2020neh event (Image NASA, ESA, Ryan Foley/UC Santa Cruz)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports a study of a so-called tidal disruption event, the destruction of a star by a black hole, in this case, an intermediate-mass black hole candidate. A team of researchers cataloged the event as AT 2020neh and studied it using the Hubble Space Telescope after its discovery, which happened thanks to the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a survey conducted using the Pan-STARRS telescopes. Intermediate-mass black holes are rare, at least as far as we know today, so each candidate discovered can offer new information, including on the possibility that they are precursors of supermassive black holes.

The Cone Nebula seen by the FORS2 instrument of VLT (Image ESO)

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ESO has released an image of the Cone Nebula captured using the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument mounted on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as part of the 60th-anniversary celebrations of this astronomical research organization’s creation. The convention to create the European Southern Observatory was signed on October 5, 1962, and led to the construction of state-of-the-art telescopes, also in collaboration with other organizations. 60 years of astronomy are also celebrated with a campaign of observations that among other things captured the image of the Cone Nebula.