MOSCOW, May 12. British astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion ever observed on a scale 100 times the size of the solar system, The Guardian newspaper reported, citing a study.
«Astronomers have filmed the largest cosmic explosion ever observed. An event that is believed to have occurred due to the absorption of a huge cloud of gas by a supermassive black hole,» the publication says.
Philip Wiseman, the head of the study at the University of Southampton in England, said that during the year the flash recorded earlier did not attract the attention of scientists, but as its brightness increased, astronomers decided to conduct additional observations. As a result, after establishing the distance to it — eight billion light years — the huge scale of the phenomenon became clear.
«According to our estimates, this fireball is a hundred times the size of the solar system and two trillion times more luminous than the Sun. In three years, the explosion released a hundred times more energy than the Sun will release in ten billion years of his life,» the scientist quoted The Guardian as saying.
Now the explosion, named AT2021lwx, has been going on for more than three years, making it the most powerful in the entire history of observation. But it is not the brightest, this title belongs to the gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A recorded last year, which, despite its brightness, lasted only a few minutes.
According to scientists, the cause of the explosion is the absorption of a huge cloud of gas by a supermassive black hole, the size of which can be thousands of times larger than the size of the Sun.
The results of the study were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Earlier, British astronomers from Durham University discovered one of the largest black holes with a mass of about 33 billion times the mass of the Sun.