Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2023

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 us. Giorgos Leloudas, an astronomer at DTU Space in Denmark and co-au- thor of this study, explains that “be- cause the relativistic jet is pointing at us, it makes the event much brighter than it would otherwise ap- pear, and visible over a broader span of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The VLT distance measurement found AT2022cmc to be the most distant TDE to have ever been discovered, but this is not the only record-break- ing aspect of this object. “Until now, the small number of jetted-TDEs that are known were initially de- tected using high energy gamma- ray and X-ray telescopes, but this was the first discovery of one during an optical survey,” says Daniel Per- ley, an astronomer at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and co- author of the study. This demon- strates a new way of detecting jetted-TDEs, allowing further study of these rare events and probing of the extreme environments sur- rounding black holes. !