Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.
The blast came from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away.
It released five times more energy than the previous record holder.
Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the event was extraordinarily energetic.
“We’ve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,” she said.
“And we don’t know why it’s so big.
“But it happened very slowly–like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years.”
The explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.
It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma–the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.
Lead author of the study Dr Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, said the blast was similar to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which ripped the top off the mountain.
“The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas,” she said.
Professor Johnston-Hollitt said the cavity in the cluster plasma had been seen previously with X-ray telescopes.
But scientists initially dismissed the idea that it could have been caused by an energetic outburst, because it would have been too big.
“People were sceptical because the size of outburst,” she said. “But it really is that. The Universe is a weird place.”
The researchers only realised what they had discovered when they looked at the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster with radio telescopes.
“The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove,” said co-author Dr Maxim Markevitch, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”
The discovery was made using four telescopes; NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.
Professor Johnston-Hollitt, who is the director of the MWA and an expert in galaxy clusters, likened the finding to discovering the first dinosaur bones.
“It’s a bit like archaeology,” she said.
“We’ve been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now.”
The finding underscores the importance of studying the Universe at different wavelengths, Professor Johnston-Hollitt said.
“Going back and doing a multi-wavelength study has really made the difference here,” she said.
Professor Johnston-Hollitt said the finding is likely to be the first of many.
“We made this discovery with Phase 1 of the MWA, when the telescope had 2048 antennas pointed towards the sky,” she said.
“We’re soon going to be gathering observations with 4096 antennas, which should be ten times more sensitive.”
“I think that’s pretty exciting.”
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MORE INFORMATION
ICRAR
The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western Australia with support and funding from the State Government of Western Australia.
THE MURCHISON WIDEFIELD ARRAY
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low-frequency radio telescope and is the first of four Square Kilometre Array (SKA) precursors to be completed. A consortium of partner institutions from seven countries (Australia, USA, India, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and China) financed the development, construction, commissioning, and operations of the facility. The MWA consortium is led by Curtin University.
Publication:
‘Discovery of a giant radio fossil in the Ophiuchus Galaxy Cluster’, published in The Astrophysical Journal on February 27th, 2020.
Multimedia:
Available from http://www.icrar.org/kaboom
Too bad this is the purest form of conjecture and hyperbole from so-called “scientists”. All of you who have masturbatory fantasies of “other worlds” and “space aliens” are truly deceived and in the gall of bitterness.
Surely, the supposed “big bang” was the biggest explosion in the (dramatic film music and god-like voice) History of the Universe.
Should we not be a little more modest and say “the biggest bang we’ve ever seen” cor, like, it really went boom.
“More research is required.” In other words, *scientists* want unlimited funds to conduct research on everything on earth, in earth, under earth, and well outside our solar system.
Anyone who dissents is, well, “unscientific” and that’s SUCH a bad thing. What did we learn from this big explosion? Anything useful? Or just interesting to astrophysicists and astronomers? Be honest now.
http://NASAGoldRecord.blogspot.com
I thought I heard the chandelier rattle.
What is it?
An “energetic outbust” detected by radio wave telescopes interpreted as signals emitted by X-rays, as stated by the scientist… “The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove,”
OK
The source of the X-rays and the physics that drive it is at issue.
Science knows that electric fields can generate X-rays.
Radiologists do it everyday when they take an X-ray image on film of a broken bone.
It is an electromagnetic machine that generates the X-rays.
At the center of a galaxy?
An electromagnetic plasmoid, or simply an electromagnetic entity.
The press release acknowledges “plasma”, an ionized state of matter, near the center of the galaxy:
“It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma–the super-hot gas”
After that… it’s pure a priori assumption.
Science can produce and replicate in the laboratory a “plasma focus”, a type of plasmoid, at a small scale — electromagnetism is known to be scale independent to 16 orders of magnitude — and that laboratory plasma experiment produces X-rays and other electromagnetic waves and particles.
Nothing in Mankind’s experience of gravity suggests it has such properties.
That’s why the necessity for such undefined & superlative terms, such as “near infinite density” or “near infinitely small space”.
After all that, the detection equipment is excellent… the technology of detection devices gets better all the time… the interpretation of the observations is key.
Seems more like a X-ray “photo” of dark matter!!! 🙂
cheers
people making these type claims are NOT scientists on any level…….speculators using incredibly limited info