Earlier this year, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) was alerted after an unusual source of visible light had been detected by a survey telescope. The VLT, together with other telescopes, was swiftly repositioned towards the source: a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy that had devoured a star, expelling the leftovers in a jet. The VLT determined it to be the furthest example of such an event to have ever been observed. Because the jet is pointing almost towards us, this is also the first time it has been discovered with visible light, providing a new way of detecting these extreme events.
The release, images and videos are available on:
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2216/
Kind regards,
The ESO Department of Communication
30 November 2022
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25 November 2022: On 2 December, at 19.00 CET, join a special, live virtual guided tour of our sites. Get to see what goes on behind the scenes at our observatories in ...
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23 November 2022: ESO’s newest scientific instrument, the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) has successfully completed its first test observations. One of them exposed the heart of the galaxy NGC 1097 ...
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