British astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion in the history of observation on a scale 100 times larger than the Solar System, The Guardian newspaper reported, citing the study.

"Astronomers have captured the largest cosmic explosion that has ever been observed. An event that is believed to have occurred due to the absorption of a huge cloud of gas by a supermassive black hole," the publication says.
According to the head of the study from the University of Southampton in England, Dr. Philip Wiseman, for a year the previously recorded flash did not attract the attention of scientists, but as its brightness increased, astronomers decided to make additional observations. As a result, after establishing the distance to it — eight billion light—years - the huge scale of the phenomenon became clear.

"According to our estimates, this fireball is a hundred times larger than the Solar System and two trillion times brighter than the Sun. In three years, the explosion released a hundred times more energy than the Sun will release in ten billion years of its life," The Guardian quotes the scientist as saying.

Now the explosion, named AT2021lwx, has been going on for more than three years, which makes it the most powerful in the entire history of observation. But it is not the brightest, this title belongs to the GRB 221009A gamma-ray burst recorded last year, which, despite its brightness, lasted only a few minutes.

According to scientists, the cause of the explosion is the absorption by a supermassive black hole of a huge cloud of gas, the size of which can be thousands of times larger than the size of the Sun.
The results of the study were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Earlier, British astronomers from Durham University discovered one of the largest black holes with a mass of about 33 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Source: РИА Новости