It happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but thanks to modern radio telescopes and the dedicated work of scientists, we now have a record of the biggest explosion to have occurred in the known universe since the Big Bang.
The enormous blast, which researchers believe was caused by the emissions of a supermassive black hole, took place at least 240 million years ago in the center of a galaxy supercluster known as Ophiuchus, which is located approximately 390 million light-years from Earth.
While it's impossible to provide an easy-to-understand quantitative account of the size of the explosion, lead researcher Dr. Simona Giacintucci, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, said it could be symbolically compared with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. "The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas," she said.
In fact, the blast, which emitted five times more energy than the previous record-holder for the biggest space explosion, was at first dismissed because of its unusual size. After employing four radio telescopes and comparing the results, the truth became clear. "The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove,” said Dr. Maxim Markevitch, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here."
Three types of black holes:
- The Opiuchus explosion was caused by a supermassive black hole, which is categorized as being at least one million times more massive than our sun.
- Stellar black holes are the most common -- there are believed to be many in the Milky Way Galaxy -- and can reach up to 20 times the size of the sun.
- The smallest black holes are known as primordial black holes, although their existence remains hypothetical. Primordial black holes are theorized to range in size from a tiny fraction of the mass of a paperclip, up to thousands of times the mass of the sun.