Space explosions more powerful than billions of suns mystify scientists

A mysterious series of deep space explosions more powerful than hundreds of billions of suns has baffled scientists, who say it pushes the limits of physics.

A report published in the journal Nature today described a “luminous fast blue optical transient” (LFBOT) which had behaved very unusually.

LFBOTs are rare, extremely powerful events – more powerful than a supernova – that occur quickly in galactic terms, fading away rapidly over a few days.

Scientists say a recent series of super-powerful explosions push the laws of physics. Credit: NASA, ESA, NSF’s NOIRLab, Mark Garlick , Mahdi Zamani (NASA)

However, the September 2022 LFBOT discussed in the report continued to explode with supernova-like energies many times, well after its initial burst and fade.

“An event like this has never been witnessed before,” said Professor Jeff Cooke from Swinburne University of Technology and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), who was a co-author of the report.

When LFBOTs explode, “they emit more energy than an entire galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun. The mechanism behind this massive amount of energy is currently unknown,” Cooke said.

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“But in this case, after the initial burst and fade, the extreme explosions just kept happening, occurring very fast – over minutes, rather than weeks to months, as is the case for supernovae.”

The event has been nicknamed the “Tasmanian devil”.

Data from the multiple observatories, including one with a high-speed camera, detected at least 14 irregular and highly energetic bursts over a 120-day period.

“Amazingly, instead of fading steadily as one would expect, the source briefly brightened again, and again, and again,” Cornell University Assistant Professor and lead author of the paper Anna Ho said.

She said the 14 bursts were likely “only a fraction” of the total number.

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“It pushes the limits of physics because of its extreme energy production, but also because of the short duration bursts,” Cooke said.

“Light travels at a finite speed. As such, how fast a source can burst and fade away limits the size of a source, meaning that all this energy is being generated from a relatively small source.”

The current theory is that a black hole or neutron star formed by the initial explosion is accreting an immense amount of matter and causing the subsequent intense bursts.