According to scientists, a fireball up to a hundred times the size of the solar system could have been caused by a huge cloud of gas sucked in by a supermassive black hole, The Guardian reports on the discovery.
The explosion, detected eight billion light-years away, is ten times brighter than any known supernova.
Search leadership Philip Wiseman, astronomer at the University of Southampton He said: The light of the explosion went unnoticed for a year, but since then it has gradually become more intense. The incredible dimensions of the explosion were only realized when other observations located after it.
Philip Wiseman explained,
The fireball is estimated to be 100 times the size of the solar system and 2,000 billion times the luminosity of the sun.
The scientist added:
In three years, this event released nearly a hundred times as much energy as the Sun would release in its ten billion years of life.
the AT2021lwx According to astronomers, the alleged explosion was caused by a huge cloud of gas, possibly several thousand times more massive than the Sun, which was swallowed up by a supermassive black hole. The gas cloud may have come from the circular cake that surrounds the black holes. However, scientists have not yet found an exact explanation for why the black hole swallowed it.
Supermassive black holes are usually surrounded by a huge cloud of gas and dust, known as a doughnut. According to the authors of the study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, some of this material – possibly due to the collision of galaxies – could have been torn apart, and thus ended up at the mouth of the black hole.
As matter drifted toward the black hole’s event horizon, it released an enormous amount of heat and light, heating part of the cake to 12,000 to 13,000 degrees Celsius.
AT2021lwx isn’t the brightest phenomenon ever observed, an even brighter gamma-ray burst was detected last year, dubbed GRB 221009A, but the event lasted only minutes. On the other hand, the AT2021lwx has been running for its third year, which means that the power it gives off is much more.
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