A black hole with the whimsical nickname Jetty McJetface is unleashing energy on a scale that makes the Death Star look underpowered. Astronomers say its beams are up to 100 trillion times more powerful than the fictional superlaser, turning a distant corner of the universe into a natural particle accelerator. The object, officially cataloged as AT2018hyz, is the aftermath of a star that wandered too close and was torn apart.
Behind the meme-ready name is a serious breakthrough in how I understand black holes, jets and the violent deaths of stars. The event is classified as a Tidal Disruption Event, or TDE, and the way Jetty McJetface has evolved over several years is forcing researchers to rethink how long these cosmic engines can run and how extreme their output can be.
From quiet black hole to 100 trillion–fold powerhouse
At the heart of Jetty McJetface is a black hole that, for most of its life, was effectively invisible. That changed when a passing star crossed the point of no return and was shredded, feeding the black hole and lighting up its surroundings. In the wake of that encounter, astronomers measured energy beams up to 100 trillion times stronger than the Death Star’s destructive blast. That comparison is not just a pop culture flourish, it is a way to convey how far beyond everyday intuition this outburst really is.
The black hole’s official designation, AT2018hyz, reflects when it was first spotted as a transient event, but the nickname Jetty McJetface has stuck because of the spectacular jets that followed. Researchers have kept tracking the object as those jets evolved, and They now describe it as one of the most energetic displays ever detected in the universe. For me, that places Jetty McJetface in the same league as the brightest gamma-ray bursts, but driven by a very different mechanism and on a much longer timescale.
What a Tidal Disruption Event really looks like
To understand Jetty McJetface, I have to start with what astronomers mean by a Tidal Disruption Event. A Tidal Disruption Event, or TDE, happens when a star strays too close to a massive black hole and the difference in gravity between its near and far sides literally pulls it apart. Instead of falling straight in, much of the stellar debris forms a hot, swirling disk that can shine across the electromagnetic spectrum. In Jetty McJetface, that process did not just create a flare, it also launched a focused jet of material.
Visualizations of this kind of event show a bright disk feeding the black hole and narrow beams shooting out along its poles. An artistic rendering of such a tidal disruption, produced by DESY and the Science Communication Lab, captures the drama of a black hole shredding a star and firing twin jets into space. Jetty McJetface fits that picture, but what sets it apart is how long the jet has stayed bright and how extreme its power output has become compared with other known TDEs.
Jets at 98% of light speed and nearly 90 degrees
The jet from Jetty McJetface is not just powerful, it is fast and sharply aimed. When the star was disrupted, a jet of relativistic material was blasted out at about 98% of the speed of light. That puts it firmly in the relativistic regime, where time dilation and beaming effects shape what we see. The jet’s direction is also striking, emerging at nearly a 90 degree angle relative to the original orbit of the star, a geometry that helps explain why the radio signal is so intense.
Because the jet is pointed close to our line of sight, its radiation is boosted, turning Jetty McJetface into a cosmic lighthouse. That beaming effect is part of why the energy output can be compared, in a straight face way, to a weapon like the Death Star. The radio emission is so strong that one analysis describes the beams as more powerful than any similar outburst ever recorded, a claim echoed in national coverage of the discovery. For me, that combination of speed, angle and power makes Jetty McJetface a textbook case of how black holes can turn infalling matter into narrow, relativistic beams.
Why Jetty McJetface is rewriting the TDE playbook
What has really surprised astronomers is how Jetty McJetface has evolved over time. Instead of fading quickly, the radio emission has grown, with the jet’s power increasing exponentially before an expected peak around 2027, according to reporting that cites study leader Dr. Cendes and credits the work of By Stephen Beech. That long, rising light curve challenges earlier models that assumed TDE jets would flare and then decline more quickly as the available fuel was consumed.
Researchers have been following AT2018hyz since its initial outburst, and They report that it has continued to surprise them with its sustained brightness and evolving spectrum. For me, that persistence suggests that the accretion disk feeding the black hole is more stable and long lived than many TDE simulations predicted. It also hints that there may be a larger population of similar events that we have missed because we did not keep watching long enough or at the right wavelengths.
From meme name to serious physics
The nickname Jetty McJetface is a deliberate nod to the internet’s Boaty McBoatface era, but behind the humor is a serious attempt to make complex astrophysics more accessible. The object’s scientific label, AT2018hyz, is forgettable to anyone outside the field, while a name like Jetty McJetface instantly signals that this is a jet driven event. That balance between levity and rigor is reflected in the way scientists have explained the discovery on platforms like r/science, where they walk through how a Tidal Disruption Event can produce bright radio, and only radio, light.
On more irreverent corners of the internet, such as r/nottheonion, the focus has been on the sheer absurdity of a real black hole outgunning the Death Star. Yet the underlying numbers are grounded in careful radio observations and modeling, as detailed in multiple national reports on the event. For me, that mix of viral name, pop culture comparison and rigorous data is a model for how frontier science can capture public imagination without sacrificing accuracy.
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