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Scientists believe that the explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is the result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, plunging into the inescapable mouth of a supermassive black hole. “In three years, this event has released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its 10bn-year lifetime.” “We’ve estimated it’s a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2tn times the sun’s,” Wiseman said. It was only when follow-up observations revealed how distant it was that astronomers appreciated the event’s almost unimaginable scale. “It went unnoticed for a year as it gradually got brighter,” said Dr Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at Southampton University who led the observations.
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