Explosion 10 Times As Bright as Supernova Discovered in Space

An enormous cosmic explosion has been spotted by scientists, marking the largest of its kind ever discovered.

The explosion was situated 8 billion light-years from Earth, according to a paper published on Friday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It has been named AT2021lwx, but given the nickname "Scary Barbie."

The explosion was seen to be ​​10 times brighter than any previously observed supernovae, and more than 100 times larger than the entirety of our own solar system.

In the paper, the researchers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. said the explosion is a particularly large supernova that has been continuously exploding since it was first spotted three years ago. The event happened 8 billion years ago, but, due to its immense distance from Earth, was detected only in 2020.

"We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova," Philip Wiseman said in a statement. He is head author of the paper and an astronomer at the University of Southampton.

"Most supernovae and tidal disruption events (bright flashes that occur when black holes tear apart wandering stars) only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two-plus years was immediately very unusual."

The explosion is not the brightest-ever observed phenomenon, however. That record is held by a gamma-ray burst observed in October 2022, officially named GRB 221009A, but nicknamed Brightest Of All Time.

First detected in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, and subsequently observed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii, the exact reason for AT2021lwx's brightness is still unclear. However, the researchers said that it may be due to a huge gas cloud being suddenly swallowed up by a supermassive black hole.

"The spectral and photometric features of the transient suggest the sudden accretion of a large amount of gas, potentially a giant molecular cloud," the authors wrote in the paper.

Black holes are extremely dense objects, formed from the heavy cores of dying stars that have collapsed in on themselves.

"They're just these like prisons for light matter and everything," astrophysicist and science communicator Becky Smethurst previously told Newsweek.

The only other objects that can be this bright are quasars, which are extremely luminous supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. These glow so bright because of the friction on the disc of gas and dust orbiting the black hole as they fall over the event horizon, the European Space Agency explained on its website.

However, according to the authors, AT2021lwx cannot be a quasar. This is due to its unique signal patterns not matching the criteria for a quasar, and the suddenness of its appearance.

"With a quasar, we see the brightness flickering up and down over time. But, looking back over a decade, there was no detection of AT2021lwx. Then, suddenly, it appears with the brightness of the brightest things in the universe, which is unprecedented," co-author Mark Sullivan said in the statement.

The authors hope to nail down the exact cause of the AT2021lwx explosion with further research.

"We are hoping to discover more events like this and learn more about them," Wiseman said. "It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key processes to how the centers of galaxies change over time."

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