The largest explosion in the known universe since the Big Bang has been recorded by modern radio telescopes. The explosion was caused by emissions from a supermassive black hole at the center of a supercluster of galaxies known as Ophiuchus. It put out five times more energy than the previous record holder and was initially dismissed due to its unusual size. The explosion was symbolically compared to the eruption of Mount St. Helena in 1980, but it was much larger. There are three types of black holes: supermassive, stellar, and primordial.
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 largest explosion in the known universe since the Big Bang.
The huge explosion, which researchers believe was caused by emissions from a supermassive black hole, occurred at least 240 million years ago at the center of a supercluster of galaxies known as Ophiuchus, which lies about 390 million light-years away. Earth.
While it’s impossible to give an easy-to-understand quantitative account of the size of the explosion, researcher Dr Simona Giacintucci, of the United States Naval Research Laboratory, said it could be symbolically compared to the eruption of Mount St. Helena in 1980 “The difference is, you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row in the crater that this eruption hit the cluster’s hot gas,” he said.
Indeed, the explosion, which put out five times more energy than the previous record holder for the largest explosion in space, was initially dismissed due to its unusual size. After using four radio telescopes and comparing the results, the truth became clear. “Radio data fits X-rays like a hand in a glove,” said Dr. Maxim Markevitch, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is the deciding factor that tells us that an eruption of unprecedented size has occurred here.”
Three types of black holes:
The Opiuchus explosion was caused by a supermassive black hole, classified as at least a million times more massive than our sun.
Stellar black holes are the most common – there are believed to be many in the Milky Way – 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 hypothesized to range in size from a small fraction of the mass of a paper clip, up to thousands of times the mass of the sun.
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