The biggest ever explosion in the Universe, after the Big Bang

By Luke86 | Astrofacts | 1 Mar 2020

The team leading by the Italian astrophysicist Simona Giacintucci, discovered it in the Ophiucus cluster

400-millions-light-years far from us. This is the distance where, few days ago, has been discovered the second biggest explosion in the Universe, after the Big Bang. Captured in the constellation of Ophiucus, this could be caused due to the activity of a super-massive black hole in the "Ophiucus cluster".

What's this? Well, this cluster is not a star cluster, neither open (like the well-known "Pleiades"), nor globular (like the Hercules Great Cluster or Tucanae 47), but a galaxies super-cluster. Yes, in some zones of the Universe you could find galaxies cluster: the most famous, due to the belonging of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is the Local Group.

What is happened?

If there are groups of even 70-100 galaxies, how can they remain close between themselves without causing disasters? Which is the only object that could allow this? Naturally, a black hole. With his amazing gravitational pull, it can attract all this galaxies. We'd better call them super-massive black holes! (and this is how they are truly called). This super-massive black holes are situated in the center of another great galaxy, much greater than others. The researchers suspects that this explosion revealed in the Ophiucus cluster could come from the activity of its super-massive black hole: "feeding" with the surrounding gases, it casually ejects huge quantity of energy and matter, like a vulcan eruption, with a speed that is very close to light's.

In pink, you can see the hot gas ejected by the black hole, in blue the radio-source due to the explosion. If we imagine the result of this explosion as a "crater", it could contain the amount of 15 Milky-Way-sized galaxies!!!