Discover the largest explosion ever seen in the universe

Astronomers have published images of the explosion that occurred inside the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.

The findings were based on data collected from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton Space Telescope and the pair of Murchison Widefield Grounday radio telescopes in Australia and the Giant Metrewave. in India. This is the most powerful explosion recorded in the history of the universe since the Big Bang , astronomers said on February 27 in the Astrophysical Journal.

Snapshot of a supermassive black hole explosion in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster.(Photo: CNN).

The explosion comes from a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy in the Ophiuchus cluster. It releases five times more energy than the previous MS 0735 + 74 event, so powerful that it created a giant hole inside the hot plasma gas surrounding the black hole.

"We've seen explosions in the center of the galaxy before but this time is really powerful. We don't know why it was so big. The explosion was so slow, for hundreds of millions of years," Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt from Curtin University at the International Radio Astronomical Research Center said.

X-ray data combined with the radio wavelength data of the ground telescope system has helped astronomers confirm the existence of the hole because it is adjacent to the radio emission container. These emissions are generated by electrons traveling at the speed of light inside energy rays emitted from the black hole.

Normally, energy rays are released on both sides of the black hole but in this explosion, the team only observed radio emissions on one side."We need more data to explain the anomalies in the event," the team said. The new discovery still has many mysteries that need to be deciphered in the near future.