Friday, May 12, 2023

3996 - SUPERNOVA - they keep getting bigger?

 

-   3996  -  SUPERNOVA  -  they keep getting bigger?   Astronomers have found a blast lasting for three years and is over ten times as powerful as the brightest supernova .  What is it?


--------------  3996  -  SUPERNOVA  -  they keep getting bigger?

-    The explosive event,”AT2021lwx” was observed to be ten times brighter than any known supernova, the explosions that occur as massive stars die. Most supernova explosions only last a few months, this explosive event has been raging for at least three years.

-

-    It is also three times brighter than the light that is emitted as stars are ripped apart and devoured by supermassive black holes, occurrences called "tidal disruption events" or "TDEs."

-

-    The blast is around 8 billion light-years from Earth and it occurred when the universe was just 6 billion years old.  It was first spotted in 2020 and was then picked up by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii.

-

-    This change in brightness can indicate a supernova or a gamma-ray burst (GRB) deep in the universe or something much closer to home like a comet or an asteroid.

-

-    Most supernovae and TDEs only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual. This may be the result of a black hole violently disrupting a cloud of gas with a mass thousands of times greater than the sun. As it did so, the black hole swallowed fragments of the gas cloud, sending shockwaves into both what remains of the gas and into a wider donut-shaped torus of dust surrounding it, causing them to emit bright electromagnetic radiation.

-

-     While AT2021lwx isn't actually as bright as the gamma-ray burst “GRB 221009A” spotted by astronomers in 2022, this event that erupted from 2.4 billion light-years away lasted for just ten hours after detection. Even though that is quite long for a GRB, it means that AT2021lwx has put out far more energy over its entire lifetime than this gamma-ray burst did in its own.

-

-    Astronomers took the spectrum of light that was emitted from the event and split it down into its constituent wavelengths, measuring how light was emitted and absorbed around the event. This allowed the researchers to calculate the distance to the source of AT2021lwx.

-

-   Once you know the distance to the object and how bright it appears to us, you can calculate the brightness of the object at its source.   The only thing in the known universe that is as bright as AT2021lwx are supermassive black holes. When these black holes feed on stellar gases that fall into them at high velocities, they can let off incredibly bright emissions known as quasars.

-

-  Astronomers currently favor the explanation that sees an extremely large cloud of mostly gaseous hydrogen or dust that was knocked from its orbit around the black hole and sucked into it. This will only be conclusively determined when the team has collected more data about AT2021lwx.

-

-    The team will now look at the explosion in different wavelengths of light including X-rays. Doing so could reveal the temperature of the event and what processes are driving it. They will also conduct computer simulations to discover if their model of a titanic gas cloud disrupted by a black hole could account for it.

-

May 12, 2023          SUPERNOVA  -  they keep getting bigger?          3996                                                                                                                        

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Friday, May 12, 2023  ---------------------------------

-

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment