A group of astronomers announced this friday the cosmic “big bang” registered to date, a energy ball whose burst is equivalent to hundred times the size of our solar system.
Scientists believe they have an explanation for the phenomenon, but warned that They need to do more research to come to a definitive conclusion.
Universe records huge cosmic explosion
The event, listed as AT2021lwxIt’s not the brightest. That honor belongs to a gamma ray burst (the electromagnetic explosion of a supernova) named GRB221009A, detected in October 2022 and which was defined as “the brightest of all time”.
Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at the British University of Southampton, explained that it was “an accidental discovery”.
The explosion had been detected in 2020automatically, by the American observatory Zwicky Transient Facility in California. But the phenomenon “It was stored in the database” of the observatoryaccording to Wiseman, before scientists took it out of the drawer again, the following year.
Scientific investigation
Astronomers still debate the cause of the phenomenon. It could be a supernovathe explosion of a massive star at the end of its cycle. But in this new phenomenon, the luminosity is ten times greater.
Another possibility is that a rupture occurred caused by what is known as tidal effectin which a star is torn apart by the attractive force of a black hole that it got too close to.
But in this case, AT2021lwx is three times too bright for that possibility to be real.
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This outburst can really only be compared to quasars, galaxies that have within them a supermassive black hole that emits a phenomenal amount of light and energy.
But the light from these is intermittent, while in AT2021lwx the beam sharply accentuated three years ago.
astronomical theories
“We’ve never seen anything like it (…). It came from who knows where”explains this scientist.
His team presents a first theory: a gigantic cloud of gas of a size equivalent to 5,000 soles is being swallowed by a black hole supermassive.
But the team is still working to show whether this theory is “entirely plausible.”
The problem is that supermassive black holes are supposed to be located in the center of a galaxy. And also, the AT2021lwx phenomenon has a size equivalent to our Milky Way.
But around there is no galaxy. “It’s a real enigma”notes Philip Wiseman.
Source: Ambito
