Astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion since the Big Bang.
The record-breaking, “gargantuan” eruption came from a black hole in a distant galaxy cluster hundreds of millions of light years away.
Famous for pulling material toward them, black holes also expel mammoth amounts of energy, blasting jets outward into space.
Which is exactly what scientists believe happened in the Ophiuchus cluster, where a large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole—the purported source of this unrivaled outburst.
“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain,” lead study author Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory, said in a statement.
“A key difference,” she continued, “is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”
The exciting find was made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the ESA’s XMM-Newton, coupled with radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.
Building on observations reported in 2016, Giacintucci & Co. relied on new radio data to confirm what researchers initially believed: that the unusual curved edge of the cluster is indeed part of the wall of a cavity in the hot gas, created by jets from the supermassive black hole.
“The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove,” co-author Maxim Markevitch, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said. “This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”
The amount of energy required to create the cavity in Ophiuchus is about five times greater than the previous record holder, MS 0735+74, and thousands of times greater than typical clusters.
A paper reporting the findings was published this week in The Astrophysical Journal. Read more in this blog post by Markevitch and Giacintucci.
More on Geek.com:
- Chandra Takes a Peek at Mega-Cluster of Galaxies
- NASA’s Chandra Snaps ‘Rainbow’ Supernova Remnant
- Researchers Discover Unexpectedly Large Black Hole
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