Astronomers have documented one of the most energetic cosmic explosions ever observed: a black hole tearing apart a massive star in an event so bright it briefly outshone almost anything else in the sky.
The event, formally designated AT2024wpp and nicknamed "the Whippet," was first spotted by Anna Ho, an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. Follow-up observations from the Liverpool Telescope in the Canary Islands and NASA's Swift satellite confirmed its extraordinary characteristics within a day of detection.
By the numbers, the blast released energy equivalent to roughly 400 billion suns, according to a paper led by Daniel Perley, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A shock wave tore outward through surrounding gas at one-fifth the speed of light. "This was many times more energetic than any similar event and more than any known explosion powered by the collapse of a star," Perley said, according to ScienceDaily.
A rare and violent class of event
Scientists classify the Whippet as a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient, or LFBOT — a rare, poorly understood category of blast first identified less than a decade ago. Researchers believe it was produced by a tidal disruption event, in which a black hole's gravity stretches and shreds a star that strays too close, pulling its remains into a superheated disk.
What has puzzled astronomers most is evidence gathered months after the initial explosion: fast-moving helium traveling at more than 6,000 kilometers per second, a signature that suggests a dense, bound structure may have survived the black hole's assault rather than being fully consumed.
The discovery adds to a small but growing catalogue of LFBOTs that has forced astronomers to reconsider how black holes and dying stars interact. Ho's team continues to monitor the Whippet's afterglow, and researchers say further observations — along with the hunt for similar events using wide-field surveys like the Zwicky Transient Facility — should help determine how common such extreme disruptions really are and what, if anything, is truly capable of surviving one.
