2023-05-15 20:00:00
According to what is so far the best theory we have to explain the birth of our universe, the Big Bang, it all began with an explosion of colossal dimensions, which, even today, continues to expand the limits of the Cosmos itself. . Since then, explosive phenomena such as stellar flares, the collapse of stars in the form of supernovae, or gamma ray bursts, have been a constant in the evolution of this cosmic scenario in which our existence unfolds.
Scientists and astronomers around the world have been studying this type of phenomenon for a long time, however, what a team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton did not expect to find while searching for supernovae was the largest explosion that has taken place since the Big Bang itself.
3 generations of stars since the Big Bang
known as AT2021lwxthe explosion is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and 3 times brighter than a tidal disruption event, that is, the process that takes place when a star gets too close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. and it is destroyed by its tidal forces, undergoing a process of spaghetting.
However, it is not the brightness of AT2021lwx that attracts the most attention, but its duration.Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record: a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. But while GRB 221009A was much brighter than AT2021lwx, it lasted only a fraction of the time, as it the new explosion detected has been going on for more than three yearsan unusual occurrence considering that, by comparison, most supernovae are only visibly bright for a few months, and which in turn means that the total energy liberated by the AT2021lwx explosion is much higher.
What Caused the AT2021LWX Explosion?
According to the researcherss AT2021lwx occurred almost 8 billion light-years away away from Earth, when the Universe was around 6 billion years old, and it is still being detected by a network of telescopes.
The only things in the universe that are as bright as AT2021lwx are quasars, that is, supermassive black holes that are attracted to themselves by a constant flow of surrounding gas that they gobble up at very high speed. “In quasars you can see fluctuations in brightness over time, but by trawling the cosmos for a decade we didn’t get any clues about AT2021lwx,” he explains. Mark Sullivanone of the co-authors of the study in which the details of the discovery are detailed. “Then all of a sudden we detected an object, which was shining with the same intensity as the brightest objects in the Universe, which is unprecedented.”
Death by spaghetting: this is how it “feels” to be swallowed by a black hole
Different theories are being considered about the origin of the explosion, however, the most plausible explanation is that this would be result of the violent absorption by a supermassive black hole of a large gas cloud, possibly thousands of times bigger than our sun. These types of events are very rare, and hitherto unprecedented on a scale to that observable in AT2021lwx.
The team now sets out to collect more data on the explosion, measuring it at different wavelengths that could reveal the object’s surface and temperature, and what underlying processes are taking place. Similarly, they will carry out enhanced simulations to test whether they match their theory of the cause of the explosion. “It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they result in key processes in how the centers of galaxies change over time,” the authors conclude.
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