The “largest” cosmic explosion ever seen, according to astronomers, is a fireball 100 times the size of our Solar System that abruptly started burning in the furthest reaches of the universe more than three years ago.
The scientists stressed that additional research was necessary to fully comprehend the perplexing occurrence even though they provided what they believe to be the most plausible explanation for the cosmic explosion.
The cosmic explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is not the universe’s brightest flash ever seen. A gamma-ray burst in October known as BOAT—for Brightest Of All Time—still holds the record for this.
The “largest” explosion, according to Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author, was AT2021lwx since it released a lot more energy than BOAT’s tiny flash did in just three years.
AT2021lwx Is the Largest Cosmic Explosion Ever
Wiseman described it as a “accidental discovery” to AFP. During an automated sky-scanning procedure in 2020, the Zwicky Transient Facility in California discovered AT2021lwx for the first time.
However, “it basically sat in a database” before being discovered by people the next year, according to Wiseman.
Astronomers, including Wiseman, didn’t realize what they had until they observed it through more potent telescopes.
They calculated the explosion’s distance to be about eight billion light years by examining various light spectra.
The explosion behind it must be substantially bigger because that is far farther away than the majority of other recent skybursts.
According to Wiseman, it is thought to be about two trillion times brighter than the Sun. Astronomers have investigated a number of potential reasons.
One is that AT2021lwx is an exploding star, however the flash is ten times brighter than any other “supernova” that has been observed in the past.
A tidal disruption event, in which a star is shattered as it is drawn into a supermassive black hole, is another possibility.
However, Wiseman noted that AT2021lwx is still three times as luminous as those events and that their findings did not support this.
A quasar, which occurs when supermassive black holes eat enormous quantities of gas at the centre of galaxies, is the only substantially equivalent brilliant cosmic event.
However, according to Wiseman, they frequently fluctuate in brightness as opposed to the AT2021lwx, which flared up out of nowhere three years ago and is still going strong today.
“This thing we have never, ever seen before—it just came out of nowhere,” Wiseman said.
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