A team of astronomers from the University of Southampton has witnessed the largest explosion ever recorded in space. According to experts, the explosion observed by the team was over 10 times brighter than any known supernova and about three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event. The explosion lasted for three years. The team published their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The explosion was traced back to eight billion years away from Earth and occurred when the universe was six billion years old.
The event, known as AT2021lwx, is the most luminous of such flares ever detected. Dr Philip Wiseman, who is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, stated that they came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by their search algorithm when they were looking for a type of supernova. Dr Wiseman led the research, and he stated that they estimated it was a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2tn times the sun’s. In three years, this event released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its 10bn-year lifetime.
The conclusion of the study noted that AT2021lwx is an extraordinary event that does not fit into any common class of transient. It is one of the most luminous transients ever discovered with a total radiated energy greater than 1053 erg. The team of astronomers think that AT2021lwx may be the result of a black hole violently disrupting a cloud of gas. They need to follow it up to reveal more about the scenario that caused the flare, and the community is strongly encouraged to search for similar events in both the future and in archival data.
The ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) based in Hawaii picked up AT2021lwx after it was first spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in 2020.
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