At the end of February, the Chandra, MWA and GMRT radio telescopes, as well as one of the ESA radio telescopes, registered a powerful explosion in a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus cluster, located 390 million light years from Earth. It was so powerful that it punctured a cluster plasma (super-hot gas near a black hole) a cavity capable of engulfing 15 galaxies such as the Milky Way.
Professor Melanie Johnson-Hollitt says that they noticed this cavity a long time ago. According to her, astronomers, knowing about its existence, did not assume that it was caused by an explosion. Now they have caught a burst of energy and have no doubt that the cavity in the Ophiuchus cluster plasma is nothing more than the result of an explosion.
Professor Johnson-Hollitt claims that this is not the first time they have seen an energy release. But this one is the most powerful among them, only the Big Bang, which gave rise to the Universe, surpasses it in scale. It is five times more powerful than the largest explosion before. By the way, it happened last year, in the center of one of the galaxies located 10 billion light years from our planet. The explosion recorded in February of this year is much more powerful, and what is most interesting, is closer to us …
According to astronomers, the explosion lasted a very long time. It took hundreds of millions of years for the energy release to finally complete. Dr. Simona Giacinthucci compares it to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Then the explosion was so strong that the top of the volcano blew off. Here everything was exactly the same, only 15 galaxies, with sizes close to ours, are placed in the "crater".
Astronomers have not yet figured out the reasons for such a large-scale explosion. A new study of the site is planned to shed light on the causes of this explosion. For this, 4096 radio telescope antennas will be used, which are 10 times more sensitive than those that detected the explosion. On the whole, there is some disturbing impression. What if the next Universe explosion occurs in our galaxy?