Astronomers have reported witnessing the strongest flare in the history of observations in the universe. It was found to be brighter than all known supernovae and comparable in radiation power to quasars, according to the study. published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The powerful AT2021lwx flare was first recorded using the Zwicky Transient Facility surveillance camera at Palomar Observatory, California in 2020 and will soon be confirmed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Automated Telescope System Last Alert System in Hawaii.
These observatories aim to detect so-called transients in the sky – events accompanied by a sharp increase in the brightness of objects. Thanks to them, research is carried out both for asteroids and comets, and for the most powerful flares in the Universe – supernova explosions and so-called tidal destruction events, in which a supermassive black hole destroys a star that has approached.
However, the AT2021lwx event was found to last much longer than most known outbreaks in space, indicating its extremely high energy, the authors of a new study led by Philip Wiseman of the University of Southampton. “Most supernovae and tidal disturbance events last only a few months before fading away. Something that has erupted for more than two years is extremely unusual,” Wiseman explained.
Scientists studied the unusual object with a number of other telescopes in the United States, Chile and Spain, and by studying the spectral characteristics they were able to determine the distance to the object – 8 billion years -light. This means that the event took place in the distant universe, when its age was only 6 billion years. “If you know the distance to an object and the apparent brightness, you can determine its true brightness. When we did these calculations, we realized that the luminosity is extremely high,” explained co-author Sebastian Hoenig.
It turned out that the luminosity turned out to be equal to 7 × 1045 erg / s – this is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova explosion and three times brighter than the event of most powerful tidal disturbance known. The only sources in the Universe of comparable luminosity are quasars, supermassive black holes that radiate due to a constant flow of gas falling on them.
“In the case of quasars, we usually see how the luminosity increases and decreases over time. But then we saw that decades ago there was nothing at the site of AT2021lwx, and suddenly it burst into flames with the brightness of the most powerful objects in the Universe, which is unprecedented,” said Mark Sullivan, co-author of the book. Taking the duration into account, the total energy release of the object was 1.5×10 53 erg.
An important question was the possible cause of such a record outbreak. Such a release of energy could be caused by the destruction of a very large star by a supermassive black hole, but scientists consider such a scenario unlikely. According to them, it was not a single star that was destroyed by the hole, but a giant molecular cloud, probably thousands of times larger than the Sun.
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