Largest Explosion Seen Since Big Bang Rocked Distant Cluster of Galaxies

Astronomers find evidence of the most powerful explosion ever seen in the history of the Universe. What do we know about this mammoth eruption?

The largest explosion ever seen in the history of the Universe ripped through a plasma cloud hundreds of millions of years ago, creating the most powerful explosion seen by astronomers since the Big Bang, a new study reveals.

The eruption, centered on a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster (roughly 390 million light-years from Earth) produced energetic jets, ripping a mammoth hole, 15 times larger than the Milky Way Galaxy, in the cloud of plasma surrounding the galactic cluster.

This extremely powerful eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, located 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. (left). Analysis of this data was provided by astronomers using several radio telescopes, including the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia (right). Image credit: (Left) X-ray: NASA/CXC/Naval Research Lab/Giacintucci, S.; XMM:ESA/XMM; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRTN; Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF — (right) Pete Wheeler, ICRAR.

“We’ve seen outbursts in the centres 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,” Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) stated.

The Not-Quite-So-Big Bang

Every major galaxy houses a supermassive black hole near its center, and powerful eruptions have been seen before around these enigmatic objects, but not like the one recently found in this new study.