The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is over 10 times brighter than any known supernova, or exploding star. The team believe it was caused by a supermassive black hole violently disrupting a cloud of gas thousands of times the size of our sun.
“We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova,” explains Research Fellow Dr Philip Wiseman, who led the study.
“We could not believe it when we worked out its extreme luminosity. But as time went by, and we ruled out different scenarios, it became clearer just how unique and special it was.”
A better understanding of black holes
The team now understand that, while this is the brightest event, there may be other related phenomena which could reveal more about how black holes work and change the way we understand galaxies.
They are using their knowledge to look for similar overlooked or misunderstood events in past data, which can be used to spot other unusual activity and catch similar events before they happen, in real time.
Philip and his team are hoping that with more data collection at a higher quality, it'll be easier to understand what is causing these unusual events, and what this means for our Universe.
We’re testing some of Einstein’s predictions, which is very cool.
"Black holes are the pulsing heart of our galaxies. They’re fundamental to how galaxies change, how they grow, and how they look. We don’t know how black holes become ‘active’ and start interacting with their galaxies. Looking at these most extreme events in those black holes is a great way to understand that."
New discoveries
This forms part of the team's involvement in leading research, which will play a fundamental role in discovering millions of other new and unknown space phenomena.
They are contributing to the UK's efforts for data processing and analysis for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). They are also co-founders of the Time Domain Intergalactic Survey (TiDES), which will make detailed observations of over 50,000 of the LSST's discoveries.
Philip said, "One thing this experience highlights is that we should always be open to the unexpected. We were looking for completely different things when we found this explosion. People who were actively looking hadn’t managed to develop the right algorithm to find it until we, and another team, did!"
This is physics that we've never witnessed. Whatever the answer is, these are all things we didn’t know were possible.
Dr Philip Wiseman, Senior Research Fellow Ernest Rutherford
