Astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion that has ever been witnessed. The event took place eight billion light years away from Earth and lasted for three years. It is also more than ten times brighter than any known supernova, reported The Guardian.
The cosmic explosion named AT2021lwx was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in 2020. The facility scans the night sky for sudden increases in brightness to spot cosmic events including passing asteroids, comets, and supernovas. Later the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii picked up the signal, the report added.
According to Dr Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at Southampton University who led the research, the cosmic event “went unnoticed for a year as it gradually got brighter”. After follow-up observations, the astronomers realised how big the explosion was and how far it occurred.
Dr Wiseman said his team was shocked when he told them about the explosion. He added, “Once we understood how extremely bright it was, we had to come up with a way to explain it.” The astronomer shared that the fireball is estimated to be 100 times the size of the solar system and two trillion times brighter than the Sun.
He said that the AT2021lwx, in three years, released, “100 times as much energy as the Sun will in its 10 billion-year lifetime.”
The explosion also tends to be three times brighter than the light produced during tidal disruption events or when a star gets destroyed by a black hole. “Most supernovae and TDEs only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual,” said Dr Wiseman, according to Space.com.
The team of astronomers thinks that the explosion could be due to a huge cloud with size thousands of times greater than the Sun falling into a black hole.
The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
