Astronomers have witnessed the largest explosion in the universe.
The explosion, dubbed AT2021lwx, was observed to be 10 times brighter than known supernovae (explosions that occur when massive stars die). And while supernova explosions last only a few months, this explosive phenomenon has been raging for at least three years.
AT2021lwx is also three times brighter than the light emitted when a star is torn apart and swallowed by a supermassive black hole. This phenomenon is called “tidal disruption phenomenon” or “TDE”. The explosion was about 8 billion light years away from Earth, so it happened when the universe was only 6 billion years old.
AT2021lwx was first discovered by the Twicky Temporary Facility in California in 2020 and subsequently captured by the Hawaii-based Asteroid Earth Collision Final Warning System (ATLAS). Both of these systems are designed to investigate astronomical phenomena in the night sky that rapidly change in brightness over time, also known as “transients.” This change in brightness could indicate supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), or more familiar entities such as comets or asteroids in the deep universe.
AT2021lwx was discovered by these facilities three years ago, but the size and power of the explosion was previously unknown.
“While looking for a type of supernova, we stumbled upon it because it was flagged by a search algorithm,” Philip Wiseman, a researcher at the University of Southampton who led the study, said in an emailed statement. “Most supernovae and TDEs last only a few months before fading out. It is immediately very unusual for something to be bright for more than two years.”
Weisman and a team of astronomers believe that AT2021lwx could be the result of a black hole violently destroying a gas cloud thousands of times more massive than our Sun. In doing so, the black hole engulfed fragments of the gas cloud, sending shockwaves through both the rest of the gas and the wider donut of dust that surrounded it, causing bright electromagnetic radiation.
Such events have been witnessed before, but they are rare. Moreover, nothing seen so far has been as large as AT2021lwx.
AT2021lwx isn’t actually as bright as gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A, which was discovered by astronomers in 2022, but the event, which erupted from 2.4 billion light-years away, lasted just 10 hours after detection. This is quite a long time for his GRB, but it means AT2021lwx emitted far more energy throughout its lifetime than this gamma-ray burst itself emitted.
Measuring the Power of a Cosmic Explosion
After the initial discovery, the team of researchers behind the discovery used several different telescopes, including the Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope, the New Technology Telescope in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain. I continued my investigation of AT2021lwx using.
Following these observations, the researchers took the spectrum of light emitted from the event, split it into constituent wavelengths, and measured how light was emitted and absorbed around the event. This allowed the researchers to calculate the distance to her AT2021lwx source.
“If we know the distance to an object and how bright it appears to us, we can calculate the brightness of that object at its source,” said team member Sebastian Hennig, a professor at the University of Southampton, in a statement. rice field. “When I ran these calculations, I found this to be very bright.”
Only supermassive black holes in the known universe are as bright as AT2021lwx. When these black holes feed on fast-falling stellar gas, they can emit incredibly bright emissions known as quasars.
“In quasars, you can see the brightness flashing up and down over time,” added team member Mark Sullivan, a professor at the University of Southampton. “But looking back over a decade, AT2021lwx was never detected, but suddenly appeared with a brightness like the brightest thing in the universe. This is unprecedented.”
Although there are other possible explanations for the explosion phenomenon, astronomers now believe that a very large cloud of mostly gaseous hydrogen or dust is being ejected from orbit around the black hole and inside the black hole. It supports the explanation that it was inhaled. This will only be finalized once the team gathers further data on his AT2021lwx.
The researchers plan to study the blast at different wavelengths of light, including X-rays. Doing so may reveal the temperature of the event and the processes that are causing it. They will also conduct computer simulations to discover if a model of a giant gas cloud destroyed by a black hole is responsible for AT2021lwx.
“With new facilities like the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Space-Time Heritage Survey coming online in the next few years, we hope to discover more events like this and learn more about them,” Weisman said. concluded with a statement. “These events, though extremely rare, are so energetic that they could be important processes in how the galactic center changes over time.”
The team’s work is discussed in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the British Royal Astronomical Society.
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