The biggest explosion since the Big Bang; Star ripped apart by a Black Hole unleashes history's most powerful and brightest known explosion
Imagine a star, more than three times the mass of our Sun, straying too close to a supermassive black hole. Instead of quietly fading, it's torn apart, and what follows is one of the most powerful explosions ever witnessed.
Astronomers now call these titanic outbursts Extreme Nuclear Transients, or ENTs, and they may be the most energetic cosmic phenomena since the universe's inception.
ENTs stand apart from regular tidal disruption events (TDEs) and supernovae by a staggering margin. The largest event recorded, named 'Gaia18cdj', unleashed 25 times more energy than the most powerful supernova ever found, equivalent to what 100 Suns would emit over their entire lifetimes, concentrated in a year.
The discovery was led by Jason Hinkle, a doctoral researcher at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy. While combing through data from ESA's Gaia mission, Hinkle noticed something odd: smooth, long‑lasting flares from galactic centers that looked nothing like typical cosmic fireworks.
'Gaia doesn't tell you what a transient is, but when I saw these smooth, long‑lived flares… I knew we were looking at something unusual,' Hinkle said
Two such flares were traced to 2016 and 2018, with a third dubbed 'Scary Barbie' detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2020. Follow‑up observations from the WM Keck Observatory and other telescopes confirmed their extraordinary brightness and longevity.ENTs behave differently from more common cosmic explosions. Typical TDEs brighten and fade within weeks, but ENTs linger for months or even years, shining nearly ten times brighter than any previously studied events For co‑author Benjamin Shappee, ENTs offer something deeper than just fireworks.'ENTs provide a valuable new tool for studying massive black holes in distant galaxies, and we gain insights into black‑hole growth when the universe was half its current age,' he said.While rare, estimated to be ten million times less frequent than supernovae, these cosmic giants offer a powerful way to study black holes in action.
With upcoming telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's Roman Space Telescope, astronomers expect to find more ENTs, painting a richer picture of how black holes shaped our cosmos. As Hinkle puts it, 'This was the final piece of my doctoral work… thrilling to think we're opening a new chapter in understanding how stars die and how black holes shape the universe.'
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