The ‘biggest explosion since the Big Bang’ has been detected by astronomers and it comes from a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 390 million light years away.
Astronomers from Curtin University in Australia used the new Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope to study the blast in the distance galactic core.
The extremely powerful eruption occurred hundreds of millions of years ago in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, and was five times as powerful as the previous ‘largest explosion’ record holder.
The Curtin team say there are a lot of questions to be answered about the ‘fossil’ remains of the explosion, adding ‘we don’t know why it’s so big’ or what caused it.
It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma – super-hot gas surrounding the black hole – big enough to fit 15 Milky Way Galaxies inside it.
Explosions from supermassive black holes are common and part of their normal cycle, according to the research team.
Most of the time the giant black holes are quiet and invisible but when material is falling into them they ‘blaze with radiation’.
It goes through a period of feeding where it gobbles up plasma from the cluster – this is then followed by periods of explosive outbursts where it shoots out jets of plasma when it is full.
Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, lead author on the paper and an expert in galaxy clusters said it was ‘extraordinarily energetic’.
‘We’ve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,’ she said.
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