The universe is a bizarre and scary place. In my most recent podcast, I uttered a completely appropriate though common cliché. That is, truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Take this recent story regarding the largest known explosion in our ENTIRE universe, so big in fact that in scale, it’s size was second only to the Big Bang. The research team who studied this monstrous event published a paper with their findings in Astrophysical Journal.
The Science
Astronomy.Com stated:
Black holes suck up matter that comes close to them, but they often expel matter as well. When matter falls toward the black hole, it’s sometimes redirected into beams or jets that blast into space and slam into surrounding material.
Suspicions of an explosion arose in 2016 when NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reported evidence there was an unusual curved edge in the Ophiuchus cluster. Scientists thought such a structure could be carved out by the jets from the supermassive black hole, but only if there was a massive explosion of unprecedented magnitude. And the 2016 study couldn’t confirm whether that was the case. But then followed the radio evidence: A new team of scientists looked at the cluster with radio telescopes and their data showed the same curved edge. Based on their observations, the edge is the boundary of a cavity in the hot gas filling the cluster, which could only have been cleared out by an intense blast from a supermassive black hole.
According to New Scientist, this sort of explosion occurs when lots of matter is falling into a supermassive black hole. As the black hole spins and distorts space-time, that matter is diverted into a powerful jet speeding away from it. The jet that punched a hole in this galaxy seems to be gone now.
“We’ve seen outbursts in the center of galaxies before, but this one is really, really massive,” said Melanie Johnston-Hollitt at Curtin University in Australia, also part of the team, in a press release. “We don’t know why it’s so big.” The void is about 750,000 light years wide.
The energy required to create a void that large is about 10 billion times the lifetime energy output of the sun. It isn’t clear how the black hole could have produced it, especially given that it isn’t active any more.
Conclusion
There’s no mistaking the fact that this explosion was ginormous. I can’t help but feel like I’m understating it. I don’t know what other word to use. The thought of seeing an explosion of that size coming our way, or even just knowing that something like it was coming our way is in a word…terrifying. But I love the mystery behind it. No one really knows what caused it. Consider, we’ve detected gravity waves and the cause of those gravity waves has so far been attributed to one of two things, the collision of two black holes or the collision of two neutron stars. Neither has resulted in an explosion of the magnitude described in this article. We’ve witnessed QUASARS, some of the brightest objects in the universe which provides evidence of super massive black holes feasting, swallowing up large amounts of matter. That’s a lot of activity going on there. Again, no hints of any explosions like the one we saw off in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Whatever the cause, we can only hope our Milky Way galaxy doesn’t get any bright ideas and try to one-up its sister galaxy.