In 2022, astronomers were keeping tabs on data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, an all-sky survey based at the Palomar Observatory in California, when they detected an extraordinary flash in a part of the sky where no such light had been observed the night before. From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1000 trillion suns. Now, the MIT astronomers, along with their collaborators, have determined a likely source for the signal -- a relativistic jet of matter streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. Astronomers have observed other such “Tidal Disruption Events” (or TDEs) in which a passing star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces, but this one is the brightest TDE discovered to date and also the furthest away, at some 8.5 billion light years away — more than halfway across the Universe. How could such a distant event appear so bright in our sky? The team says the black hole’s jet is likely pointing directly toward Earth.