'Extraordinary event': Astronomers witness largest cosmic explosion in space

The largest explosion in space has been witnessed by a team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton. Experts said that the observed explosion is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova (exploding star) and around three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event — a cosmic event in which the star falls into a supermassive black hole. The explosion lasted for three years.

The results were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which presented the multiwavelength observations of the explosive event dubbed as AT2021lwx - which is the most luminous of such flares ever detected and traced to eight billion years away from Earth and occurred when the universe was just six billion years old.

As quoted by The Guardian, Dr Philip Wiseman, who is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, "We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova."

Dr Wiseman, who led the research, said "We've estimated it’s a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2tn times the sun's. In three years, this event has released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its 10bn-year lifetime."

The conclusion of the study noted that AT2021lwx is an "extraordinary event" that does not fit into any common class of transient. It is one of the most luminous transients ever discovered with a total radiated energy greater than 1053 erg. The conclusion was made after collecting and analysing multiwavelength photometry and spectroscopy of the transient.

The team of astronomers think that AT2021lwx may be the result of a black hole violently disrupting a cloud of gas, but they also mentioned that further mentioned that they need to follow it up to reveal more about the scenario that caused the flare, and the community is strongly encouraged to search for similar events in both the future and in archival data.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii picked AT2021lwx after it was first spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California in 2020.

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