The Biggest Explosion in the History of the Universe

BOOM! It was the biggest explosion in the history of the universe and you didn't hear a thing.

According to space.com, astronomers saw a cosmic explosion that ripped through the center of a distant galaxy cluster. They saw it but didn't hear it because, as the tagline on the poster for the movie Alien (1979) reminded us -"In space, no one can hear you scream."

Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "...you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

The explosion was in the Ophiuchus cluster 390 million light-years from Earth and it is thought that the source was a supermassive black hole.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reported a strangely curved edge in the cluster, but after analyzing the combined data from Chandra and Europe's XMM-Newton space telescope, as well as radio information gathered by the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, it shows that the curved edge is indeed part of a cavity wall.

Not that most of us can grasp the explanation but it likely resulted when the black hole's outburst accelerated electrons to nearly the speed of light. The energy released by the blast is hundreds of thousands of times greater than explosions typically seen in galaxy clusters, and five times higher than the previous biggest one.