According to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists have registered an explosion that is five times stronger than anything they have ever seen. But what could have caused such a surprising event? Researchers have identified one of the most mysterious objects in the universe – black holes – as the likely culprit of the incident. They not only capture matter, but also throw it away. The outlier looks like streams of matter in the form of heated rays or rays – the so-called rays. However, such "eruptions" are typically hundreds or even thousands of times less severe than the explosion.

The explosion happened very far from our planet – in the cluster of Ophiuchus galaxies

The most powerful explosion in the history of the universe

The strongest explosion in the past 13.8 billion years occurred at a distance of 390 million light years from Earth. Scientists have demonstrated this event by analyzing the data series from NASA's Chandra X-ray orbital observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM Newtonian telescope.

According to the researchers, the explosion occurred in the core of the Ophiuchus cluster of galaxies, which – if our planet is the reference point – is in the far corner of space. The Ophiuchus cluster is the largest supercluster of galaxies in the universe. Dark matter and hot gas, held together by the galaxy's gravity, served as the source of a powerful explosion. A likely culprit, astronomers have discovered, is a supermassive black hole in the center of one of the galaxies in the Ophiuchus supercluster.

The largest explosion discovered in the universe is characterized by a white spot surrounded by hot gas clouds

As the researchers suspect, the super-massive black hole in question threw several extremely strong jet currents in different directions based on data obtained from Chandra. The substance in such jets often comes down to the matter around a black hole. So the jets carved a huge cavity into the hot cluster gas.

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Despite the fact that the news of the strongest explosion in the history of the universe was just now appearing in all world media, the explosion was first discovered in 2016. Then the scientists noticed an unusually curved edge on one of the images of the Ophiuchus cluster taken with Chandra. The researchers suggested that the image had a cavity wall created by nozzles in hot gas. However, this assumption was rejected because the researchers believed that the formation of such a cavity required an enormous amount of energy. In one way or another, scientists today agreed that a truly unprecedented event was taking place in the cluster of Ophiuchus galaxies, namely an unprecedented force, the release of matter from the bowels of a super massive black hole.

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However, researchers still have questions. Since in similar cases the images show an area on the side opposite the black hole, the reason why only an area of ​​the radio emission is visible in the received images is unknown.