In December 2016, one of the objects appearing as a star in digital telescopic images became brighter 250 times. At a distance of 8 billion light years is CTA 102 - a supermassive black hole surrounded by a disk of swirling matter and jets of material (blazar).
In the astronomical world, this almost does not happen. The object was fixed with a network of telescopes to search for blazars (WEBTC). The importance is that the radiation of blazars allows you to understand the process of galactic formation.
The nearest galaxies have central supermassive black holes. In the old galaxies, these holes are lonely and have long swallowed the surrounding material. But in young galaxies, they are still surrounded by material, which means they can be found. The CTA 102 flare in 2016 (a gas clot flowed through a magnetic tube) allowed us to study the structure of the blazar. Such objects are so far away that they can only be seen in the form of point light in photometric images.
Of course, the search for blazars is a hard and long work, but scientists claim that it is rewarded. Now we know that not all bright points in the sky are stars. Some of them act as galactic nuclei distant by billions of light years.
