Largest Cosmic Explosion Ever Seen Detected By Astronomers

The greatest explosion ever detected has reportedly been found by astronomers.

The explosion is more than 10 times brighter than any recorded exploding star, known as a supernova.

Compared to most supernovae, which typically only appear brilliant for a few months, it has endured for more than three years.

According to one explanation, the explosion resulted from a large cloud of gas being sucked into a black hole.

The Zwicky Transient Facility in California was the first to automatically notice and document the first sky flash in 2020. But it wasn't discovered by scientists searching through the data until a year later.

The occasion was known as AT2021lwx. They initially dismissed it as unappealing because there was no way to determine its distance or assess its brightness, BBC reported.

A team from the University of Southampton, led by Dr. Philip Wiseman, examined the light from the event last year, allowing them to determine its distance: 8 billion light years. Dr. Wiseman described the precise instant at which the phenomenon's brightness was determined.

"We thought 'oh my God, this is outrageous!'

The team couldn't fathom what might have brought about something so brilliant. Dr. Wiseman claimed that nothing in the body of scientific literature could explain anything so brilliant and persistent.

"Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual."

According to his theory, the explosion was caused by a supermassive black hole suckling up a gigantic cloud of gas that may have been billions of times bigger than our Sun.

As a result, the black hole's surrounding cloud would be left with superheated remains, creating the appearance of a large ring doughnut in space.

Giant black holes are supposed to exist at the center of every galaxy. Dr. Wiseman thinks that such intense explosions might be crucial to the process of "sculpting" the galactic center.

"It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key processes to how the centers of galaxies change over time."

The search is now on for more huge explosions like this, according to Dr Robert Massey who is the Deputy Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"We've never seen anything like this before and certainly not on this scale," he said.

"I'd be amazed if this is the only object like this in the Universe."

With more telescope systems coming up in the upcoming years, Dr. Wiseman hopes to find more instances like this.

In order to gather further information about the explosion, the team is now observing the object in several wavelengths, including X-rays, which could disclose the object's temperature and any activities that might be occurring at the surface.

Additionally, they will run updated computational simulations to see if their theory of what caused the explosion holds up.

A gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A, which lasted a little over ten hours, was the brightest explosion ever seen and was discovered by researchers last year.

Even though this was brighter than AT2021lwx, it only shone for a small portion of the time, indicating that the AT2021lwx explosion had much greater explosive power.

The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society have released the details.