Scientists have discovered the cause of the most powerful explosion in space

A recently observed super-powerful explosion in space could be caused by a star colliding with a small or medium-sized black hole. Study This was published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The anomaly, dubbed AT2022aedm, was spotted by astronomers in a red galaxy located about two billion light years from Earth.

At first, astronomers assumed that it was a supernova. But after analysis they abandoned this version - the power of the explosion turned out to be about 100 times greater. Additionally, supernovae dim within a month, and AT2022aedm faded in just 14 days. This means that in just two weeks it emitted as much energy as our Sun would produce in 10 billion years.

There were also suspicions that it could be a core collapse supernova. These are formed in cases where huge stars with a mass exceeding eight times the mass of the Sun, fusion fuel runs out - then their cores can no longer fight gravity and end up are destroyed.

Subsequent analysis of the cosmic anomaly also ruled out other types of supernovae.

As a result, astronomers came to the conclusion that this was something completely new. Probably the result of a collision between a star and a black hole. They especially like this version, since such processes have not yet been studied. In addition, the study of such explosions will finally reveal how supermassive black holes, which are thousands of times larger than the Sun, grew to such frightening sizes.

The authors of the work have already made significant progress in the investigation, having discovered two “unsolved cases” corresponding to AT2022aedm in archival documents. That is, a similar class of super-powerful cosmic explosions had been observed before, but probably went unnoticed among the huge flow of data. This means that the truth may be somewhere nearby.