A cosmic blast was seen through both space and ground-based telescopes by astronomers which have been said to be the biggest explosion on record.
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It came from 390 million light-years away
This massive explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster which is about 390 million light-years away from Earth. It had also released about five times more energy than the previous one, beating the old record holder.
Simona Giacintucci, a study lead author of the Naval Research Laboratory said in a statement that, in some ways, the blast that had happened is identical to how Mt. St. Helens volcano eruption in 1980 that basically tore the top off of the mountain. Five times greater than the once known as the largest and most powerful explosion, MS 0735+74.
This explosion was so powerful that it punched and caused a dent the size of 15 Milky Ways. Giacintucci and her co-workers think that the blast originated from a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. These are among the largest structures in the universe which contains thousands of galaxies individually, dark matter and hot gas.
This was actually hinted years ago
Back in 2016, there were earlier hints suggesting some activity regarding this when Chandra was used for observing and it happened to reveal s possible cluster explosion in the future.
Norbert Werner, an astronomer along with his colleagues had, in fact, noticed there was some cavity in hot gas and did not think that it was possible because the cavity was so big that would need to require so much energy to form and people around them were skeptical as well because of the size of this outburst. Looking at the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster with radio telescopes was when they only realized what they had discovered. They used four telescopes, namely the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array or the MWA in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope or GMRT in India.
The X-ray data and radio wavelength data that was put together by some of the ground-based telescopes, helped confirm the cavity. All of those radio emissions were created by electrons that were actually moving at the speed of light. Dr. Maxim Markevitch, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the radio data that fit inside the X-rays are basically like a hand in a glove and that this is the discovery that told them an eruption with an unexpected size and range occurred there.
The scientists described the discovery as being a bit like archaeology where they were given tools to dig deeper and find out more about this and try to get as much information as they can little by little, and they are please about the results so far and are actually looking forward to more discoveries in the universe in the future.
