Astronomers have recorded the most powerful explosion in the universe

Miscellaneous / by admin / May 12, 2023

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The reason could be a huge gas cloud that went off course and fell into the mouth of the "space monster".

Astronomers have recorded the most powerful cosmic explosion ever observed. It released more than 100 times more energy than the Sun would release in its entire lifetime. Most likely, a black hole of monstrous proportions is to blame. Study this was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This event, called AT2021lwx, took place 8 billion light-years from Earth. The explosion erupted when the universe was 6 billion years old.

We stumbled upon this by accident as our search algorithm flagged it when we were looking for supernovae. Most supernova and tidal disruption events [bright flashes that occur when black holes tear apart rogue stars] last only a couple of months before disappearing. And here the outbreak lasted for more than two years, which was very unusual.

Philip Wiseman

Astronomer at the University of Southampton in the UK.

The cause of the mysterious explosion is unclear, but astronomers believe it is most likely the result of a giant cloud of hydrogen gas thousands of times the size of our sun was swallowed up by a supermassive black hole.

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As parts of this cloud are absorbed, the shockwaves travel through the remaining hot gas, causing a giant explosion whose light has been bombarding the Earth for more than two years and has not yet died out. Using two telescopes designed for all-sky surveys - the Zwicky Transient Facility in California and ATLAS in Hawaii - the researchers detected the bright flashing light of this event.

Black holes are born as a result of the collapse of giant stars and grow by absorbing gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As a result, they heat up and emit light that can be detected with telescopes, turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei.

The most extreme nuclei are quasars - these are supermassive black holes billions of times heavier than the Sun, which absorb the surrounding matter, forming an accretion disk. The explosion of AT2021lwx, despite its incredible brightness, was too short-lived to be classified as a quasar.

In a quasar, we see how the brightness fluctuates up and down over time. But looking back, we see that AT2021lwx was not detected for more than a decade, and then suddenly appears with the power of the brightest objects in the universe, which is unprecedented. This means that the explosion likely came from a gas cloud that initially orbited safely around the black hole, but went off course and fell into the jaws of a space monster.

Mark Sullivan

Professor of Astronomy at the University of Southampton.

To confirm the origin of the object that caused the explosion, the researchers are now scanning it in more detail at different wavelengths. This can reveal its surface shape, temperature, and the mysterious processes that generate the bright light.