Belfast scientists detect rare cosmic explosion brighter than hundreds of billions of suns
A rare supernova "unlike any other" has been detected by researchers in Belfast who were monitoring data from a telescope at a partner university in Hawaii.
The team of astrophysicists at Queen's University has been studying live feeds from a network of robotic telescopes in Hawaii, South Africa and Chile for a decade.
This find, two billion lightyears away, is a special one.
It is thought to be as bright as hundreds of billions of suns.
There are two other factors which make this supernova a rare one.
It faded and cooled down far faster than would be expected, and it was detected in a red galaxy which is also not considered normal.
How did the scientists catch this event?
QUB researchers have been monitoring the Atlas network, which scans the entire visible sky every night to search for any object that moves or changes in brightness.
They noticed this supernova at the end of 2022, and have now published the subsequent research paper on what they found.
Dr Matt Nicholl, from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's, said this is very exciting.
"It's not only one of the brightest we've ever seen, it's also one of the fastest decaying we've ever seen. It got incredibly bright and faded away super quickly," he said.
"And that combination is really, really unusual. But it also happened in a galaxy where you wouldn't ever expect to see a bright, fast supernova.
"So you put all those three things together, and this is a supernova unlike anything we've seen before."
Speaking of the significance of this news, Dr Nicholl said: "It shows that even after more than ten years of systematically searching the sky, we're still always find a new things that give us a lot to look forward to, especially for even bigger telescopes coming along soon, but also changes our understanding potentially of some stellar physics and black hole physics.
"We think that this might have been caused by a star destroyed by a sort of a medium sized black hole, but bigger than the star, but not as big as the supermassive black holes and centres of galaxies.
"And those are really hard to find and are kind of a missing link in understanding how black holes grow.
"So we hope that a new object like this can help us to find more of those in the future and figure out really how these big black holes get the size that they do."
Dr Nicholl has been able to incorporate a special link to Liverpool Football Club.
"So this supernova, or whatever kind of explosion it was, was very luminous, and faded away very fast, and it also cooled down dramatically as it faded.
"So I just took those acronyms for the three letters.
"Luminous, fast cooling... LFC. I realised it spelled out the acronym for my favourite football team, Liverpool Football Club."
He insists it was a coincidence.
"I hope with the name sticks, and that Liverpool are happy to have stars in the sky as well as stars on the pitch," Dr Nicholl said.The research paper has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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