Largest Cosmic Explosion Ever, Raging For 3 Years, Spotted By Astronomers

Astronomers have spotted the largest cosmic explosion ever in space that has been raging for more than three years. The event, named AT2021lwx, was found to be 10 times brighter than any known supernova, according to space.com. Supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star. Usually, the explosion lasts only a few months, but this event has lasted much longer than that. The region where the blast took place is eight billion light years away from Earth, said the outlet.

Since the universe is expanding, the explosion took place when it was around six billion years old.

AT2021lwx is also three times brighter than tidal disruption events (TDEs), an astronomical phenomenon that occurs when a star approaches sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole to be pulled apart by its tidal force.

The event was first picked up by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in 2020 and was then detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii, said space.com.

Talking about the event, Dr Philip Wiseman, research fellow at the University of Southampton, told Sky News, "We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova."

"Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual," added Dr Wiseman, who led the research.

A study detailing the extraordinary cosmic event has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It argues that the explosion could have been caused by a vast cloud of gas violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole.

Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record - a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A.