Telescopes Detect ‘Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang’

Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space — five times bigger than anything observed before. Iwastheone shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth. The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Researchers reported their findings [PDF] in The Astrophysical Journal. “I’ve tried to put this explosion into human terms and it’s really, really difficult,” co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News. “The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst — which it probably didn’t, but anyway — it’d be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that’s incomprehensibly big. Huge.”