Do we have enough astronomers researching the universe?
This discovery happened earlier this year through an all-sky survey at the Palomar Observatory in California. An all-sky survey is a relatively low cost way of monitoring the whole sky for this exact purpose — to detect and investigate photometric variability. Photometric variability is any change in the perceived brightness of light. So, if we are looking at stars very far away, we can measure their perceived brightness over time, and then record any changes.
This particular detection was in a part of the sky where nothing had been observed before. After detecting the flash, the astronomers from NASA and Caltech posted this discovery to an astronomy newsletter. This discovery over course got the attention of many around the world. You could say it turned heads, or more accurately it turned telescopes. In a matter of days, more telescopes had honed in to collect more data.
“Now, the MIT astronomers along with their collaborators have determined a likely source for the signal. In a study appearing today in Nature Astronomy, the scientists report that the signal, named AT 2022cmc, likely comes from a relativistic jet of matter streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.
Astronomers have observed other such “tidal disruption events,” or TDEs, in which a passing star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces. AT 2022cmc is brighter than any TDE discovered to date. The source is also the farthest TDE ever detected, at some 8.5 billion lights years away — more than halfway across the universe.” — MIT
This is an exciting discovery, but perhaps the most interesting observation is that the black hole’s jet might be pointing directly at Earth. Maybe we have something heading our way? In any case, this discovery illuminates a need to continue to develop more powerful telescopes and grow the number of astronomers in our society.
Consider the amount of human capital and resources it took to detect and investigate this flash of light. From the relatively low cost all-sky survey to the probably hundreds of researchers that were activated to investigate, this was a sizeable effort. And, there are also opportunity costs to investigating any particular flash of light. There is a lot happening in the universe, and we need to be able to detect and investigate in many areas simultaneously. It is impressive that we coordinated a global network of telescopes to investigate this flash of light. What else could we do with an even more advanced and larger global network of astronomers and telescopes?
