Astronomers claim to have detected the largest cosmic explosion to date, currently lasting over three years.
The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, took place nearly eight billion light-years away when the universe was about six billion years old and is still being detected by a network of telescopes, the researchers said.
The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova or exploding star, and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, when a star collapses into a supermassive black hole, they said.
The event currently lasts over three years, compared to most supernovae, which researchers say are only visibly bright for a few months.
“We came across it by chance because it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were looking for a type of supernova,” said Philip Wiseman, a scientist at the University of Southampton who led the research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“Most supernovae and tidal disturbances only take a few months to die down.” For something to be clear for two years or more was immediately very unusual,” Wiseman said in a statement.
The team believes the explosion is the result of a huge cloud of gas, perhaps a thousand times the size of the Sun, being violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole.
Fragments of the cloud would be absorbed, sending shock waves through its remains and into the large dusty “doughnut” surrounding the black hole. Such events are very rare and nothing of this magnitude has ever been witnessed.
Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion in history – a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. Although it was brighter than the AT2021lwx, it only lasted a fraction of the time, meaning the total energy released by the AT2021lwx explosion is much larger.
AT2021lwx was first detected in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, USA, and subsequently captured by the Hawaii-based Asteroid Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).
These devices scan the night sky to detect transient objects that rapidly change brightness, indicating cosmic events such as supernovae, and also find asteroids and comets. However, the extent of the explosion was not yet known.
There are various theories about what could have caused such an explosion, but the team believes that the most plausible explanation is an extremely large cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) or dust that deviated from its path around the black hole and was ejected. arriving.
Scientists are now going to collect more data about the explosion – measurements of different wavelengths, including X-rays, that could reveal the object’s surface and temperature, and what underlying processes are taking place.
They will also run enhanced computer simulations to test whether they match their theory of what caused the explosion.
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