Astronomers in the US and Australia have reported the largest known explosion since the Big Bang! Using four telescopes, the team spotted a huge hole that the blast punched in the plasma that envelopes a galaxy cluster. The researchers reckon that the hole was made by a colossal burst of energy from a supermassive black hole at the centre of one of the cluster’s galaxies. Black holes are massive bodies, whose gravitational force of attraction is so large, that they do not even let light escape from within them. The explosion released an estimated 5 ×1054 J of energy. To put this in context, this is how much energy we would receive from the sun in 100 billion billion years! (That’s 10 followed by 20 zeroes!).
If you aren’t yet convinced by the magnitude of this huge explosion: “You could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s [plasma],” says Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in the US, who is one of six astronomers involved in the study.
The event occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is 390 million light-years from Earth (yes, that’s very very far!). Some of the largest explosions that we are able to witness are supernova explosions, caused by dying stars. These take a few months to occur; however, this particular explosion took over hundreds of millions of years to occur!
Evidence for the explosion was observed using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. The telescope used to make this discovery had a whopping 2048 antennas! This number is being increased to 4096, which is said to make the telescope ten times more sensitive! This suggests just how monumental the event was.
The cluster plasma is the name of an area in space, and there were several studies which predicted a huge rift in this cluster plasma, which were eventually all abandoned. However, this observed explosion has led to newfound evidence that the huge rift is real!
This discovery gives new insights into the nature of the great Big Bang, which has been a hot topic for scientific debate for decades. However, this explosion was much bigger and its exact magnitude cannot be properly estimated yet. This observation could help us understand the ever so mysterious start to our universe so much better!