New Delhi | Jagran News Desk: In a major discovery, astronomers have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the universe since the Big Bang. According to a report by news agency PTI, the discovery was made using four telescopes, including the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in Pune.
The blast released five times more energy than the previous record holder and it came from a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away.
According to the report, the other telescopes that were used in the discovery were NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia.
"We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," said Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.
"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," she added.
The explosion, which was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma -- the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole, occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.
The lead author of the study Simona Giacintucci from the Naval Research Laboratory in the US, said that 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.
"The cavity in the cluster plasma had been seen previously with X-ray telescopes," Johnston-Hollitt said.
However, the scientists had earlier dismissed the idea that it could have been caused by an energetic outburst, because it would have been too big. But they later realised that what they had discovered when they looked at the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster with radio telescopes.
"People were sceptical because the size of outburst," she said. "But it really is that. The Universe is a weird place."
"The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove," said co-author Maxim Markevitch, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.
"This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here," Markevitch said.
Professor Johnston-Hollitt 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," Johnston-Hollitt said.
(With PTI inputs)