A team of researchers have detected the biggest explosion in the Universe after the Big Bang.
Scientists of International Center for Radio Astronomy Research discovered the biggest explosion ever seen in the universe since the big Bang.
The surprising cosmic phenomenon occurred in a supermassive black hole in the center of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, located 390 million light years from Earth.
Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, teacher at the node of the Curtin University from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and co-author of the article, said in a statement:
We’ve seen pops in the centers of the galaxies before, but this one is very, very massive. And we don’t know why it’s so big.
The discovery
The detection was made possible by the use of four telescopes located throughout the world, among which are the Chandra X-ray Observatory of NASA and the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory of the European Space Agency.
The explosion was so violent that it made a hole in the hot gas surrounding the black hole, as observed by the X-ray telescopes used by the team.
For Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory and lead author of the investigation, the explosion was so intense that she compared it to the eruption of Mount Saint Helena occurred in 1980 and one of the most violent in US history.
Giacintucci said in a statement:
The difference is that you could place 15 galaxies of the Milky Way in a row in the crater, this eruption hit the hot gas of the cluster.
In addition, the cosmic outbreak was characterized by something more apart from its large size, by its extreme slowness.
Johnston-Hollitt said in a statement:
It happened very slowly, like a slow-motion explosion that took place over hundreds of millions of years. ”
Now the team is focused on the task of making more observations using twice as many antennas, which will increase sensitivity tenfold.
The scientific study has been published on the pre-print server arXiv.org.
Source: Phys.org
