An explosion big enough to fit fifteen Milky Way Galaxies in a row has been discovered.
CNN World reports the record-breaking explosion originated inside the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster 390 million light-years away. Experts also say the explosion was likely created by a supermassive black hole.
Black holes are well known for sucking in matter, but they also shoot it outwards in the form of jets or beams. The energy behind this explosion breaks all previous records, beating the previous largest known explosion five times over.
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Astronomers observed the explosion from both ground and space-based telescopes like NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, Australia’s Murchison Widefield Array, as well as the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope located in India. However, the explosions were also noticed several years ago in 2016 but were so large astronomers at the time believed it was too unlikely to be one.
It wasn’t until now that the X-ray data was combined with radio wavelength data from ground-based telescopes to help confirm the cavity created by the explosive black hole. These observations also tell us that the explosion is no longer occurring as the jet activity has stopped meaning there’s no longer any gas to power the explosion.
This subsided explosion isn’t all astronomers have been up to recently. Radio signals have been picked up repeating in an odd pattern and a new method to detect potentially habitable planets using radio waves has been developed. As for other big destructive forces, stay tuned for six billion years from now when the sun destroys our solar system’s asteroid belt.
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[poilib element=”accentDivider”]Hope Corrigan is an Australian freelance writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Source: IGN.com Biggest Explosion in the Universe Detected