"Once you know the distance to the object and how bright it appears to us, you can calculate the brightness of the object at its source," study co-author and University of Southampton astrophysics professor Sebastian Hönig said in the release. While brighter cosmic explosions have been recorded in the past, they lasted a fraction of the time and released much less energy overall, meaning that nothing of this scale has ever been witnessed before. Scientists believe it is the result of a vast cloud of mostly hydrogen gas or dust being violently consumed by a supermassive black hole. AT2021lwx was then studied further with a space-based telescope and observatories in Chile and Spain.ĪT2021lwx, which is still being tracked, is nearly 8 billion light years away. Now over three years old, the AT2021lwx explosion was first detected in 2020 by observatories in California and Hawaii that scan the night sky for objects that rapidly change in brightness, like supernovae, asteroids and comets. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual.” “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,” lead author and University of Southampton research fellow Philip Wiseman said in a news release. The researchers from the University of Southampton in England say the explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is ten times brighter than any known exploding star, or supernova, and three times brighter than the flash that occurs when a star is consumed by a supermassive black hole, which is known as a tidal disruption event. A team of astronomers have identified the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed.
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