The phrase Eureka! rumbles in the facilities of an observatory in China. Scientists in charge of reviewing the data recorded by this radio telescope They mistakenly detected a supernova and when checking the information on its power they realized that it is the brightest ever witnessed by humanity.
He Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), located in Daocheng, Sichuan Province, China is tasked with capturing high-altitude cosmic rays. Its main objective is to study high-energy particles that come from space.
Therefore, although it can happen, it is not normal for it to record data from supernovae, which, as we have previously detailed, are massive exploding stars.
The LHAASO observatory uses a wide range of detectors distributed over a large area to measure the particles that interact with the Earth’s atmosphere and generate what is known as “particle showers”.
This is how it collects an unusual amount of energy in space. They analyzed the recorded data and after several days of studies they saw that it was a supernova.
They continued the checks, compared with other findings and determined that this is the brightest ever seen, according to a review by Urban Technowhich echoes the report published by the prestigious magazine Science.
That’s when they called her BOAT, which in English means (Brightest Of All Time)the brightest of all time.
The data captured by the LHAASO observatory say that the amount of energy, in the first 100 minutes of explosion, exceeds 200 gigaelectronvolts. It is an ejection of energy in the firmament with more than 64 thousand photons detected.
In the universe, according to what science has seen, there are two kinds of supernovae:
- Type II Supernovae: They occur when a massive star, with a mass at least 8 times that of the Sun, exhausts its nuclear fuel in its core. As a result, the core collapses under its own gravity, generating a violent explosion.
- Type Ia Supernovae: They occur in binary star systems, where a white dwarf star (the hot, dense remnant of a star with a mass similar to the Sun) accumulates material from its companion until it reaches a critical mass. At that point, the pressure and temperature inside the white dwarf become high enough to start a runaway nuclear reaction, causing an explosion.