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The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 88–104 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

A black hole can launch a powerful relativistic jet after it tidally disrupts a star. If this jet fortuitously aligns with our line of sight, the overall brightness is Doppler boosted by several orders of magnitude. Consequently, such on-axis relativistic tidal disruption events have the potential to unveil cosmological (redshift z > 1) quiescent black holes and are ideal test beds for understanding the radiative mechanisms operating in super-Eddington jets. Here we present multiwavelength (X-ray, UV, optical and radio) observations of the optically discovered transient AT 2022cmc at z = 1.193. Its unusual X-ray properties, including a peak observed luminosity of ≳1048 erg s−1, systematic variability on timescales as short as 1,000 s and overall duration lasting more than 30 days in the rest frame, are traits associated with relativistic tidal disruption events. The X-ray to radio spectral energy distributions spanning 5–50 days after discovery can be explained as synchrotron emission from a relativistic jet (radio), synchrotron self-Compton (X-rays) and thermal emission similar to that seen in low-redshift tidal disruption events (UV/optical). Our modelling implies a beamed, highly relativistic jet akin to blazars but requires extreme matter domination (that is, a high ratio of electron-to-magnetic-field energy densities in the jet) and challenges our theoretical understanding of jets.

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Fig. 1: AT 2022cmc’s X-ray evolution on various timescales at different epochs.
Fig. 2: Multiwavelength light curves of AT 2022cmc.
Fig. 3: AT 2022cmc’s multiwavelength SEDs and their best-fit models.
Fig. 4: Schematic of our proposed scenario for AT 2022cmc.

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Data availability

All the NICER and Swift data presented here are public and can be found in the NASA archives at: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/W3Browse/w3browse.pl. All the photometry presented in this work is available in Supplementary Data 1. Time-resolved NICER spectra can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6870587. Swift/XRT photometry is provided in Supplementary Data 2. The data presented in Table 1 are also available in a machine-readable format in Supplementary Data 3. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

D.R.P. would like to thank S. Dicker for sharing details of the GBT observations. D.R.P. was supported by NASA grant number 80NSSC22K0961 for this work. S.J.B. would like to thank Science Foundation Ireland and the Royal Society (grant number RS-EA/3471) for their support. S. Schulze acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, under project number 2016-06012. F.O. acknowledges support from MIUR, PRIN 2017 (grant number 20179ZF5KS) “The new frontier of the Multi-Messenger Astrophysics: follow-up of electromagnetic transient counterparts of gravitational wave sources” and the support of HORIZON2020: AHEAD2020 grant agreement number 871158. G.L. and P.C. were supported by a research grant (number 19054) from VILLUM FONDEN. N.C.S. acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and from STFC grant number ST/M001326/. M.N., B.P.G., A.A., E.J.R. and X.S. are supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 948381). L.R. acknowledges the support given by the Science and Technology Facilities Council through an STFC studentship. T.L. acknowledges support from the Radboud Excellence Initiative. T.M.B. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCIN), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) 10.13039501100011033 under the PID2020-115253GA-I00 HOSTFLOWS project, from Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) under the PIE project 20215AT016 and the I-LINK 2021 LINKA20409 and the programme Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M. C.-C.N. thanks the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) for funding under the contract 109-2112-M-008-014-MY3. M.P.T. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709) and through the grant PID2020-117404GB-C21 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE). Support for A.C. was provided by ANID through grant number ICN12_12009 awarded to the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS) and by ANID’s Basal projects AFB-170002 and FB210003. E.R.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through grant number AST-2006684, and a Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award through the Oakridge Associated Universities. Pan-STARRS is a project of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii, and is supported by the NASA SSO Near Earth Observation Program under grant numbers 80NSSC18K0971, NNX14AM74G, NNX12AR65G, NNX13AQ47G, NNX08AR22G and 80NSSC21K1572 and by the State of Hawaii. This publication has made use of data collected at Lulin Observatory, partly supported by MoST grant number 108-2112-M-008-001. We thank Lulin staff H.-Y. Hsiao, C.-S. Lin, W.-J. Hou and J.-K. Guo for observations and data management. This work was supported by the Australian government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP200102471). The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant number NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant number AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. R.R. and D.R.P. acknowledge partial support from the NASA grant number 80NSSC19K1287, for contributions to NICER. The European VLBI Network is a joint facility of independent European, African, Asian, and North American radio astronomy institutes. Scientific results from data presented in this publication are derived from EVN project code RM017A. e-VLBI research infrastructure in Europe is supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number RI-261525 NEXPReS. A.H. is grateful for support by the I-Core Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation, and support under ISF grant number 647/18. This research was supported by grant number 2018154 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). We acknowledge the staff who operate and run the AMI-LA telescope at Lord’s Bridge, Cambridge, for the AMI-LA radio data. AMI is supported by the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and by the European Research Council under grant number ERC-2012-StG-307215 LODESTONE. NICER is a 0.2–12 keV X-ray telescope operating on the International Space Station. The NICER mission and portions of the NICER science team activities are funded by NASA. The AstroSat mission is operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the data are archived at the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC). The SXT data-processing software is provided by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India. The UVIT data were checked and verified by the UVIT POC at IIA, Bangalore, India. M.G. is supported by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101004719. L.S. acknowledges support by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Advanced Grant KILONOVA number 885281). M.P.T. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (grant number SEV-2017-0709) and through grant number PID2020-117404GB-C21 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE). Support for this work was provided by NASA through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) contract number SV3-73016 to MIT for Support of the Chandra X-Ray Center (CXC) and Science Instruments. S.Y. has been supported by the research project grant “Understanding the Dynamic Universe” funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation under Dnr KAW 2018.0067, and the G.R.E.A.T research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, project number 2016-06012. S.J.S., SS and K.W.S. acknowledge funding from STFC grant numbers ST/T000198/1 and ST/S006109/1. I.A. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe Program and acknowledges support from that programme, from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 852097), from the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 2752/19), from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and from the Israeli Council for Higher Education Alon Fellowship. E.F. is supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. G.P.S. acknowledges support from The Royal Society, the Leverhulme Trust and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (grant numbers ST/N021702/1 and ST/S006141/1). L.G. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCIN), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) 10.13039/501100011033, and the European Social Fund (ESF) “Investing in your future” under the 2019 Ramón y Cajal programme RYC2019-027683-I and the PID2020-115253GA-I00 HOSTFLOWS project, from Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) under the PIE project 20215AT016 and the programme Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M. ECF is supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. This work was completed in part using the Discovery cluster, supported by Northeastern University’s Research Computing team.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dheeraj R. Pasham, Matteo Lucchini, Erin Kara, Peter Kosec & Ronald Remillard

  2. Department of Astrophysics/IMAPP, Radboud University, PO Box 9010, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Tanmoy Laskar & Peter G. Jonker

  3. Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Benjamin P. Gompertz, Matt Nicholl, Aysha Aamer, Samantha Oates, Evan J. Ridley & Xinyue Sheng

  4. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Benjamin P. Gompertz, Matt Nicholl, Graham P. Smith, Aysha Aamer, Samantha Oates, Evan J. Ridley & Xinyue Sheng

  5. Astrophysics Research Centre, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Shubham Srivastav, Stephen J. Smartt, M. Fulton, James H. Gillanders, Thomas Moore & Ken W. Smith

  6. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA, Australia

    James C. A. Miller-Jones & Adelle Goodwin

  7. Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, 1800 Sherman Ave, Evanston, IL, USA

    Kate D. Alexander

  8. Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford, UK

    Rob Fender & Lauren Rhodes

  9. The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India

    Gulab Dewangan & Priyanka Rani

  10. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Keith Gendreau & Elizabeth Ferrara

  11. Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA

    Eric R. Coughlin

  12. Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Assaf Horesh & Itai Sfaradi

  13. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Postbus 9513, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Sjoert van Velzen

  14. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD, USA

    Muryel Guolo

  15. Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Noel Castro Segura

  16. European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova 3107, Casilla 19, Santiago, Chile

    Joseph P. Anderson & Thomas Wevers

  17. The School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Iair Arcavi

  18. CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program, CIFAR, Toronto, Canada

    Iair Arcavi

  19. School of Physics, O’Brien Centre for Science North, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Seán J. Brennan

  20. Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

    Kenneth Chambers, Thomas de Boer, Hua Gao, M. Huber, Chien-Cheng Lin & Richard Wainscoat

  21. DTU Space, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Elektrovej 327, Lyngby, Denmark

    Panos Charalampopoulos & Giorgos Leloudas

  22. The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University, AlbaNova, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ting-Wan Chen, Steve Schulze & Sheng Yang

  23. Instituto de Astrofísica, Pontificia Universidad Católica, Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile

    A. Clocchiatti

  24. Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Nuncio Monseñor Sótero Sanz 100, Of. 104, Providencia, Santiago, Chile

    A. Clocchiatti

  25. IAP/Paris & Sorbonne Universities, Paris, France

    Michel Dennefeld

  26. Center for Exploration and Space Studies (CRESST), Greenbelt, USA

    Elizabeth Ferrara

  27. Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

    Elizabeth Ferrara

  28. Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC), Campus UAB, Carrer de Can Magrans, s/n, Barcelona, Spain

    Lluís Galbany & Tomás Müller-Bravo

  29. Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), Barcelona, Spain

    Lluís Galbany & Tomás Müller-Bravo

  30. Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw, Al. Ujazdowskie 4, Warszawa, Poland

    Mariusz Gromadzki

  31. SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Niels Bohrweg 4, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Peter G. Jonker

  32. Research Computing, ITS Division, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Manasvita Joshi

  33. Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, UK

    Thomas L. Killestein

  34. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Daniel Kocevski

  35. Department of Astronomy, University of California, 501 Campbell Hall, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Raffaella Margutti

  36. Tuorla Observatory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Seppo Mattila

  37. School of Sciences, European University Cyprus, Diogenes Street, Engomi, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Seppo Mattila & Miguel Perez-Torres

  38. Graduate Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan

    Chow-Choong Ngeow & Yen-Chen Pan

  39. INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico d’Abruzzo, via M. Maggini snc, Teramo, Italy

    Francesca Onori

  40. Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Glorieta de la Astronomía s/n, Granada, Spain

    Miguel Perez-Torres

  41. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Zaragoza, Pedro Cerbuna 12, Zaragoza, Spain

    Miguel Perez-Torres

  42. GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Planckstraße 1, Darmstadt, Germany

    Luke Shingles

  43. Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    James F. Steiner

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Contributions

D.R.P. led the overall project, acquired X-ray data, performed the reduction and wrote a large portion of the paper. M.L. performed SED modelling and the subsequent interpretation, and wrote part of the paper. T.L. aided in the interpretation and writing of the paper. B.P.G., S.S., M.N., S.J.S. and M.F acquired optical data and wrote part of the paper. K.G. and E.F. carried out the NICER X-ray observations. G.D. and P.R. acquired and reduced AstroSat data. G.P.S wrote the discussion about gravitational lensing. J.C.A.M.-J., K.D.A., S.v.V., T.L. and A.G. acquired the radio data, performed their reduction and contributed towards the writing of the manuscript. L.R., A.H., I.S. and R.F provided the AMI/radio data and wrote part of the paper. M.G. reduced optical data and wrote part of the paper. N.C.S., A.A., J.P.A., I.A., S.J.B., K.C., P.C., T.-W.C., A.C., T.d.B., M.D., L.G., H.G., J.H.G., M.G., M.H., P.G.J., E.K., T.L.K, P.K., G.L., C.-C.L., R.M., S.O., F.O., Y.-C.P., M.P.T., R.R., E.J.R., S.S., X.S., L.S., K.W.S., J.S., R.W., T.W. and S.Y. facilitated the discussion and contributed to the interpretation of the results. D.K. computed the Fermi upper limits. M.J. aided in SED modelling. C.-C.N., E.R.C., S.M., T.M. and T.M.-B contributed towards the data and interpretation.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dheeraj R. Pasham.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Astronomy thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Neil Gehrels Swift XRT 0.3-8 keV image of NICER’s FoV.

The yellow circle with a radius of 47″ and is centered on AT 2022cmc’s radio coordinates of 13:34:43.2, +33:13:00.6 (J2000.0 epoch). The outer/dashed cyan circle shows NICE /XTI’s approximate field of view of \(3.{1}^{\prime}\) radius. There are no contaminating sources within NICER’s FoV. The north and east arrows are each \(20{0}^{\prime}\) long. The color bar shows the number of X-ray counts.

Extended Data Fig. 2 A sample NICER X-ray spectrum.

The orange and the blue data represent the source and the estimated background spectra, respectively. This particular dataset is from the E0 epoch of Table 1. The 1σ uncertainties are smaller than the data points.

Extended Data Fig. 3 AT 2022cmc’s X-ray luminosity and energy spectral slope evolution.

(a) Logarithm of the observed 0.3-5 keV (filled blue circles; left y-axis) and the absorption- corrected 0.3-10 keV luminosities (filled red crosses; right y-axis) in units of ergs s1. The error bars on the luminosities are much smaller than the size of the data points. (b) Evolution of the best-fit power-law index with time. The abrupt changes in index around day 7 (rest-frame) coincide with a hard X-ray (2-5 keV) flare that happened during epoch E21 (the data point with best-fit photon index of ~ 1.3; see Table 1). The neutral Hydrogen column of the host was tied across all epochs and the best-fit value is (9.7 ± 0.3) × 1021 cm2. All the error bars represent 1σ uncertainties. The individual NICER spectra are provided as supplementary data.

Extended Data Fig. 4 VLT/X-shooter spectrum of AT2022cmc, obtained at ≈ 15 days after discovery.

The featureless blue continuum can be modelled with a blackbody with T ≈ 30,000 K (solid blue line), consistent with the optical bump in the broad-band SED from day 25-27 (Fig. 3). The inset shows a zoom in on the region with CaII absorption lines identified by (7).

Extended Data Fig. 5 Pre and post-outburst optical images of AT2022cmc.

Left panel: A colour composite image of the field prior to the outburst, made using data from the Legacy Imaging Surveys (140) using g, r and z filters. There is no emission at the location of AT2022cmc (cross). Nearby catalogued objects with their photometric redshifts are shown (circles). Right panel: A PS2 w-band image of AT2022cmc post outburst. The size of both image cutouts is \(1.{1}^{\prime}\times 1.{1}^{\prime}\). North and the East arrows are each 10″.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Average X-ray (0.3-5 keV) power density spectrum of AT2022cmc.

The frequency resolution and the Nyquist frequency are 1/950 Hz and 1/8 Hz, respectively. This power spectrum is an average of 29 individual PDS. The dashed, red curve is the best-fit power-law model. Systematic variability on timescales of ~ 1000 s (lowest frequency bin) is evident. All the frequencies and hence the timescales are as measured in the observer frame. The error bars represent 1σ uncertainties.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Spectral energy distribution of AT2022cmc at ≈ 15.6 days after discovery.

Data at radio (VLA), mm-band (GBT), UV/optical (Swift/UVOT, ZTF, PanSTARRS) and X-ray frequencies (NICER), demonstrate that the SED at this time cannot be explained as a single synchrotron spectrum. The SED at ≲ 25 GHz is optically thick (vFv ∝ v3), with a spectral break near ≈ 90 GHz. The spectral index from the GBT observation at ≈ 90 GHz to the NICER band is vFv ∝ v0.37, which (i) is substantially shallower than the observed NICER spectral index (vFv ∝ v0.57) and (ii) over-predicts the UV flux at this time. All the error bars represent 1σ uncertainties.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Best fitting External inverse Compton (EC) model.

The EC model requires a jet that under-predicts the radio flux. Furthermore, EC produces too little soft X-ray flux, and as in model 1 the emission at these frequencies is dominated by SSC. All the error bars represent 1σ uncertainties.

Extended Data Fig. 9 Contour plots for the best-fitting parameters of model 1.

For clarity, we only show the 2d posterior distributions of parameters that are degenerate with each other.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Data 1

Combined photometric data for AT 2022cmc.

Supplementary Data 2

Swift XRT X-ray flux over time.

Supplementary Data 3

Machine-readable version of Table 1.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Data relevant to Fig. 1.

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Pasham, D.R., Lucchini, M., Laskar, T. et al. The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole. Nat Astron 7, 88–104 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01820-x

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