Once a black hole gets large enough, it creates such a gravitational whirlpool that it starts sucking in anything that’s close to it, growing in the process. With all these telescopes pointed at AT2021lwx, astronomers eventually identified the black hole-related explanation they have settled on in their findings.īlazek says the astrophysical qualities of a black hole definitely are primed to cause an explosion at this scale. AT2021lwx was emitting too much light for too long to fit any known category of astronomical phenomenon, whether it was a supernova, aka an exploding star, or a tidal disruption, which occurs when a star has been pulled into a black hole and destroyed.Įventually, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Chile’s New Technology Telescope and Spain’s Gran Telescopio Canarias were all brought online to aid in studying AT2021lwx. Video: Webb telescope will alter view of cosmos, thanks to a Northeastern graduateĪstronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility in California originally discovered AT2021lwx in 2020 but struggled to suss out the exact cause of such a massive explosion. ![]() “It really seems like, especially when they have time to do some more modeling, this will be an important step in understanding what’s happening in the middle of galaxies,” says Jonathan Blazek, a physics professor at Northeastern University. The explosion itself is far from Earth, but its discovery could help scientists better understand black holes, which sit at the center of many galaxies, including our own. Stretching across a space that is 100 times the size of our solar system, the black hole formation is currently giving off 100 times more energy than the sun will emit over the course of its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. That’s according to findings recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ![]() Although scientists at first struggled to determine the cause of the cosmic blast, which they have named AT2021lwx, they now think the culprit is a supermassive black hole that came in contact with a gargantuan cloud of gas. The explosion, which occurred 8 billion light years away from Earth billions of years ago, has been erupting for three years without any signs of slowing down. Astronomers have discovered the biggest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, a massive burst of energy 2 trillion times brighter than our sun and 10 times more powerful than the most powerful supernova.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |