Astronomers watch the largest explosion for 3 years.

Saturday, May 13, 2023|

Astronomers saw the largest explosion in space. The explosion that occurred as massive stars die was observed to be ten times brighter than any known supernova. The explosion has been raging for at least three years.

The light that is emitted as stars are ripped apart and devoured by black holes is three times brighter. The universe was just 6 billion years old when the blast occurred. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii picked up AT2021lwx after it was spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in 2020. Both of these systems are designed to survey the night sky for astronomy events that rapidly change in brightness over time.

This change in brightness can be a sign of a comet or a supernova deep in the universe. Three years ago, it was spotted by these facilities, but the scale and power of the explosion were unknown until now. What is a supernova? "We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search engine when we were looking for a type of supernova," said Philip Wiseman, who led the research. Most TDEs last for a few months before fading away.

It was very strange for something to be bright for two years. A cloud of gas with a mass thousands of times greater than the sun may have been caused by a black hole. The black hole caused a donut-shaped torus of dust surrounding it to emit bright radiation when it swallowed fragments of the gas cloud. Events like this are very rare.

AT2021lwx isn't as bright as the gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A, which erupted from 2.4 billion light-years away. Even though it is a long time for a GRB, AT2021lwx has put out more energy than this burst did. The team of researchers used several different telescopes, including the Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope, the New Technology Telescope, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias, to examine AT2021lwx.

The researchers were able to calculate the distance to the source. "If you know the distance to the object and how bright it appears to us, you can calculate the brightness of the object at its source," team member and University ofSouthampton professor Sebastian Hnig said in the statement. We realized this is very bright after we performed those calculations. Black holes are the only thing in the universe that is bright.

Quasars can be released when black holes feed on stellar gases that fall into them at high speeds. "With a quasar, we can see the brightness flickering up and down over time," Mark Sullivan said. Suddenly, it appears with the brightness of the bright things in the universe, which is unprecedented, after looking back over a decade. The explanation that sees an extremely large cloud of mostly gaseous hydrogen or dust that was knocked from its orbit around the black hole and sucked into it is currently favored by the astronomer.

When the team has collected more data, this will be determined. It's boom! Did scientists solve the mystery of the super-bright exploding 'cow' in space? The team will look at the explosion in different wavelength of light, including X-rays. The temperature of the event could be revealed by doing so. If their model of a titanic gas cloud disrupted by a black hole is correct, they will conduct computer simulations to find out.

"With new facilities, like the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, coming online in the next few years, we are hoping to discover more events like this and learn more about them." It could be that these events, which are extremely rare, are key processes to how the centers of galaxies change over time. The team's research is discussed in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society..