Billions of
light years away, there is a huge ball of hot gas that is brighter than
hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to visualize something so bright. So
what is it? Astrophysicists are not
really sure, but they have a couple theories.
They think
it may be a very infrequent type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so
powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the
most powerful supernova ever seen as of today.
This object
is so luminous that astrophysicists are having a really hard time finding a way
to describe it. “If it truly is a
magnetar, it's as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned
it up to 11,” said Krzysztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State
University and the team's co-principal investigator, comedically suggesting it
is off the charts on a scale of 1 to 10.
The object
was first detected by the All Sky Automated Survey of Supernovae (ASAS-SN or
“assassin”), which is a small network of telescopes used to find bright objects
in the cosmos. Although this object is
extremely bright, it still can’t be observed by the naked eye as it is 3.8
billion light years away.
ASAS-SN,
since it started in 2014, has found nearly 250 supernovae, though this finding,
ASASSN-15lh, stands out because of its sheer magnitude. It is 200 times more powerful than the
average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than the sun, and 20 times
brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy combined.
“We have to
ask, how is that even possible? It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright,
and that energy has to come from somewhere.” said Stanek.
Todd
Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, has one probable
explanation. The supernova could have
produced a very rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar — a swiftly
spinning and very dense star with a crazy strong magnetic field.
This is how
crazy magnetars are: to shine as bright as it does, this magnetar would have to
spin at least 1,000 times a second, and change all of that rotational energy to
light with almost much 100% efficiency — making it the most thrilling example
of a magnetar that is physically possible.
“Given those
constraints, will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is
a magnetar, then the answer is basically no.” Thompson said.
Over the
coming months, the Hubble Space Telescope will try to solve this enigma by
giving astrophysicists time to see the host galaxy surrounding this
object. The team may find that this
bright object lies in the very center of a large galaxy — meaning the object is
not a magnetar at all — and the gas around it is actually evidence of a
supermassive black hole.
If that is
the case, then the bright light could be explained by a new kind of event, said
study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio
State. It would be something that has
never, ever been seen before at the center of a galaxy.
Whether it
is a magnetar, a supermassive black hole, or something else entirely, the
results are probably going to lead to new thinking about how objects form in
the universe.
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