Biggest explosion ever seen in the Universe

A massively powerful eruption has been detected in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, located about 390 million light years from Earth. It is the biggest such event ever observed.

In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain, said Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study. A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the clusters hot gas.

Astronomers made this discovery using X-ray data from NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESAs XMM-Newton, and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.

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Image: Credits: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/NRL/S. Giacintucci, et al., XMM-Newton: ESA/XMM-Newton; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRT; Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF Read the rest