![]() ![]() But this didn’t fit either-there didn’t seem to be a galaxy around AT2021lwx or any record of previous quasar activity, per the Times. Quasars are large emissions of energy from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Such a large star is very rare, Wiseman tells the Guardian.Īnother possible explanation was a quasar, the brightest, most powerful class of objects in the known universe. But models indicated the “black hole would have to have swallowed up to 15 times the mass of our sun to stay this bright for this long,” Matt Nicholl, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland who helped analyze the ongoing explosion, tells the New York Times’ Dennis Overbye. The team was mystified by such a huge event, thinking at first it was a black hole eating a star. Their calculations indicated that the burst happened nearly eight billion light-years away from Earth, when the universe was around six billion years old. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual.”Īstronomers continued investigating the explosion from telescopes in Spain, Chile and low-Earth orbit. “Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. “We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova,” Wiseman says in a statement. ![]() ![]() The flare was spotted by two systems that survey the night sky looking for objects with rapid shifts in brightness: California’s Zwicky Transient Facility first detected it in 2020, and then it was found by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii. “In three years, this event has released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its ten-billion-year lifetime.” “We’ve estimated it’s a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2 trillion times the sun’s,” Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in England, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. The event, called AT2021lwx, is ten times brighter than any known exploding star-or supernova-and has lasted for more than three years. Astronomers have spotted the largest cosmic explosion on record. ![]()
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