British News Agency

The explosion’s source is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) — a bright, compact region at the center of a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole that actively consumes matter. Gas and dust fall into the rotating disk around the black hole, heating up to extreme temperatures and emitting intense radiation.

Researchers believe the black hole may have devoured a giant star that would otherwise have exploded as a supernova, releasing such tremendous energy.

Matthew Graham, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the study published in *Nature Astronomy*, explained: “Roughly one in 10,000 AGNs shows some kind of flaring activity, but this one is so extreme that it falls into its own category (about one in a million events).”

The flare suggests the existence of previously unknown populations of massive stars in the centers of large galaxies containing supermassive black holes, shedding light on complex interactions between these cosmic giants.

“Superman” was first detected in November 2018 at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey and the Zwicky Transient Facility. Zwicky, equipped with a wide-angle camera, is renowned for discovering transient cosmic events like rapidly flaring supernovae.

Graham said the object did not initially appear unusual — just bright. The team first thought it was a blazar, a supermassive black hole that ejects energetic jets of matter across the cosmos.

Five years later, the team reanalyzed the early data and noticed varying brightness in the signal. Follow-up observations using other telescopes, such as the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, revealed that the light source was far brighter and more energetic than originally thought.

Scientists concluded that the light came from an active galactic nucleus estimated to be 500 million times the mass of the Sun.