A star torn apart at the edge of the visible universe

Jiazheng Zhu, Zelin Xu, Ning Jiang, Ji-an Jiang, Tinggui Wang, Yuhan Yao, Ryan Chornock, Erica Hammerstein, Yibo Wang, Min-Xuan Cai, Shifeng Huang, Wenkai Li, Mingxin Wu, Chichuan Jin, Jie Lin, Jianwei Lyu, Dezheng Meng, Weiyu Wu, Zhengyan Liu, Junhan Zhao, Ziqing Jia, Chengyi Wang, Lulu Fan, Xu Kong, Feng Li, Ming Liang, Jinling Tang, Hairen Wang, Jian Wang, Yongquan Xue, Ji Yang, Hongfei Zhang, Wen Zhao, Qingfeng Zhu

A new survey telescope detected a tidal disruption event (star torn apart by a supermassive black hole) at redshift 1.037, making it the most distant of its kind. The event shows a perfectly blue, featureless spectrum with no emission lines—unusual for TDEs—and a luminosity of 8×10^44 erg/s. This discovery matters because distant, pristine TDEs let astronomers measure where these events actually radiate their energy, potentially solving why observed optical light is fainter than theory predicts.