An international research team led by scientists from the University of Southampton has detected the most powerful cosmic explosion in history to date, ten times more powerful than any known supernova caused by the explosion of a giant star.
Special tools
This massive cosmic event was observed in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient facility in California and the Atlas Earth Shock Alert System in Hawaii.
These observatories carry out a very special task, different from the rest of the known telescopes, which is to conduct a full and instantaneous scan of the night sky to detect transient objects that change rapidly in brightness, indicating events such as supernovae, as well as the passage of asteroids and comets in the sky.
The research, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, said the researchers used three additional telescopes to accurately track and study the event, including the SWIFT Space Observatory, an X-ray satellite launched by NASA in 3, along with two ground observatories in Chile and Spain.
Monitoring of this event in 2020 via the Zwicki Transient Object Facility and Ground Shock Alert System (European Southern Observatory)
3 years after the explosion
Researchers in this range announced last year that the brightest cosmic event of this kind is a gamma-ray burst 221009 called GRB 221009A, which is believed to have signaled the birth of a new black hole, but it lasted only 10 hours.
According to the new study, the new cosmic explosion, called AT2021lwx, continued to explode for a full 2021 years until this year 3, releasing as much energy as the GRB 2023 A, and consequently placing it in a higher ranking.
Researchers from this team believe that the new cosmic explosion occurred as a result of a massive black hole in the middle of a massive stellar cloud thousands of times larger than the mass of the Sun that creates something like a ring around it.
According to the study, as the black hole swallowed fragments from that cloud, shock waves were released to hit the rest of the gas, causing a massive explosion that emitted bright electromagnetic radiation that the researchers observed on Earth.
According to an official press release from the University of Southampton, these researchers are currently studying this explosion in a more diverse wavelength range, in an attempt to more accurately detect the temperature of the event and its mechanism of action.
Besides, the team will also conduct computer simulations of this cosmic event in order to build a more accurate model to track this type of explosion in the future.