The telescopes which picked up the event continually survey the night sky to detect transient objects that rapidly change in brightness.
Until now, the scale of the explosion has been unknown The team gaining more data by the day, measuring different wavelengths, including X-rays which could reveal the object’s surface and temperature, and what underlying processes are taking place. Occurring 8 billion light years away, the cosmic explosion was found in 2020įragments of the cloud would be swallowed up by a violent disturbance of a supermassive black hole, inciting huge shockwaves and forming a large dusty ‘doughnut’ surrounding the black hole.įirst detected in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, AT2021lwx was later also picked up by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii. When compared to most supernovae which are only visibly bright for a few months, the explosion took place nearly 8 billion light years away, when the universe was around 6 billion years old, and is possibly thousands of times larger than our sun. Three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, the AT2021lwx was the largest known cosmic explosion recorded by the University of SouthamptonĪ cosmic explosion, known as AT2021lwx, has currently lasted over three years and is still being detected by a network of telescopes.
0 kommentar(er)
