Madrid – The consequences of the most powerful explosion of a black hole seen in the Universe have been recorded by telescopes of the European Space Agency (ESA) and of the POT.
The “gigantic explosion” occurred in the cluster of Ophiuchus galaxies, about 390 million light years away, a conglomerate of thousands of galaxies, hot gas and dark matter that are linked by gravity.
The eruption, says an ESA statement, is linked to “powerful jets released by the supermassive black hole” that is in the center and that feeds on the surrounding gas, which occasionally explodes large amounts of matter and energy .
The images were taken by ESA’s XMM-Newton telescope and NASA Chandra along with two radio telescopes on Earth.
The eruption of the black hole released an amount of energy about five times that of the most powerful event of this type known to date, observed in the cluster of galaxies MS0735.6 + 7421.
The lead author of the Simona Giarcintucci study, from the Naval Research Laboratory (USA), explained that “this explosion is similar to the way in which the eruption of Mount Saint Helena (USA) in 1980 tore the top of the mountain ”and destroyed 500 square kilometers of forests.
The key difference between the two is that “you could put fifteen galaxies like the Milky Way” into the crater that the black hole burst through the hot gas of the Ophiuchus cluster, the expert said in a statement from the Chandra telescope.
The black hole eruption must have ended because researchers now see no evidence of the jets in the radio data, the note adds.
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