Astronomers Detect Largest-Ever Explosion in the Universe

[Creag]

Astronomers observing the universe have detected some massive bursts of energy over the years, but nothing compares with the blast recently spotted by scientists at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. The explosion some 390 million light-years away is the largest ever recorded. The epicenter of the eruption appears to be a supermassive black hole, but the team is still puzzling over why it was so gigantic.

The explosion came from the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Like most large galaxies (including our own), the one at the epicenter of the blast has a supermassive black hole in the center. Astronomers have seen energy bursts from black holes in the past, some of which were staggeringly powerful even from millions of light-years distant. This one didn’t just edge out the previous record-holder, though. The Ophiuchus blast was five times more powerful than the next most powerful explosion. So, we’re lucky this explosion happened in a galaxy safely on the other side of the universe.

Astronomers Detect Largest-Ever Explosion in the Universe - ExtremeTech

The epicenter of the eruption appears to be a supermassive black hole, but the team is still puzzling over why it was so gigantic.

www.extremetech.com

 

[mercurial]

The universe likes a good old bang.

 

[Creag]

Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster say they’ve got a new record-holder for the biggest explosion seen in the universe since the Big Bang in which our universe began. The blast is thought to have come from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy – at the heart of a galaxy cluster – hundreds of millions of light-years away. Researchers estimate that the blast released five times more energy than the previous record holder and hundreds of thousands of times more energy than a typical galaxy cluster.

Astrophysicist Melanie Johnston-Hollitt at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, is co-author of a study about the explosion, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal on February 28, 2020. She said the event was extraordinarily energetic:

We’ve seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive. And we don’t know why it’s so big. But it happened very slowly, like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years.

The gargantuan explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster about 390 million light-years from Earth. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe held together by gravity, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter, and hot gas. In the center of the Ophiuchus cluster, there is a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole. Researchers think that the source of the gigantic eruption is this black hole. The explosion was so powerful, it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma, the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.

| EarthSky

Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the universe since the Big Bang.

earthsky.org