What we know about the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed by astronomers

Astronomers have witnessed the biggest and brightest cosmic explosion they have ever seen, and they have named it AT2021lwx. The eruption was ten times brighter that any supernova they have encountered, which could make it the BOAT, or ‘Brightest of All Time.’

A study published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society described their observations of the explosion, which is located eight billion light years away from the earth. The brightness has endured for three years, discharging two trillion times the light of the Earth’s sun, and three times the energy of tidal disruption events, which is when a black hole pulls in a star and destroys it.

The unmatched brilliance of AT2021lwx

AT2021lwx is so bright that the research team has deemed it to be almost 100 times more luminous than all the stars in our galaxy combined.

Scientists first noticed the event in November 2020 at the Caltech-run Zwicky Transient Facility in California. A few months later, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii also detected it.

What kind of event was cosmic explosion AT2021lwx?

The research team first believed they were beholding a quasar, which takes place when an enormous black hole sucks in gas and dust. However, quasars tend to flicker over time, while the light of AT2021lwx has held steady.

The astronomers then thought it could be a supernova, which is an explosion that marks the end of a star’s life, releasing an immense amount of energy over a span of months. However, AT2021lwx has lasted for years.

Next, they suspected that it could be a tidal disruption event, but this recently observed cosmic event emitted much more light and is lasting for a much longer period of time.

After considering these possibilities, the astronomers now believe that it could be a mammoth gas cloud being disrupted by a colossal black hole.

They described the phenomenon as “an extraordinary event that does not fit into any common class of transient [or stellar eruptions]. This reveals that there is still a great number of astronomical occurrences that have yet to be discovered and observed.

The research team is trying to learn more about the unprecedented event by studying wavelengths of light, to ascertain factors such as its temperature and why it occurred in the first place.