The Biggest Black Hole Eruption Ever Seen

The largest, record-breaking explosion ever witnessed in our universe have just occurred. It is a tremendously powerful eruption in a galaxy cluster known as Ophiuchus, which is located roughly 390 million light-years away from us. In the cluster's center is a large galaxy containing a super-massive black hole. Scientists believe that this black hole might be the source of the explosion.

Galaxy clusters are considered the largest structures in our Universe, which are held and maintained together by gravitational forces and contains thousands of hot gas, dark matter, and individual galaxies. The lead author of the study which reported this event, Simona Giacintucci of Washington, D.C.'s Naval Research Laboratory, noted that the eruption had punched a cavity so big into Ophiuchus' hot gas that 15 Milky Way galaxies can be lined up into a row in it.

This discovery was made with the help of X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory of NASA and XMM-Newton of ESA, as well as radio data from Australia's Murchison Widefield Array (or MWA) and India's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (or GMRT).

Black holes are well known for sucking in material into them. Nonetheless, they also often expel a lot of energy and matter, when the matter which fall into them is redirected as beams or jets that are then propelled away from the black hole, slamming onto surrounding materials.

Observations made by Chandra revealed the first hints of a giant explosion in Ophiuchus. Norbert Werner and his fellow scientists reported their discovery in 2016 of an unusually curved edge in the Ophiuchus cluster, as shown by images from Chandra. It was speculated that it could be a portion of a cavity wall in the hot gas caused by the jets coming from the super-massive black hole. This possibility, however, was discounted, partly due to the large amount of energy that would have been needed by the black hole to produce such a huge cavity.

The new study made by Giacintucci et.al confirmed the occurrence of a gigantic explosion, due to the confirmatory data from the XMM-Newton, the MWA, and the GMRT. The massive energy needed to produce such a cavity is roughly five times larger than that of MS 0735+74, the former record holder. It is also thousands of times larger than the usual explosions made by galaxy clusters.

The scientists speculate that the eruption already stopped due to the lack of the presence of jets. The data from Chandra show that the coolest and densest gas is now in a different location, and since this gas has shifted away, the black hole has lost its fuel for growth, which in turn stopped the blasts.

Co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt from Australia's International Centre for Radio Astronomy stated that more multi-wavelength observations are needed to completely understand all the processes at work there, and to answer the remaining questions posed by the event.

Scientists have described this event as the largest explosion in the universe since the Big Bang