(STUDY FINDS) — PERTH, Australia — The mysteries of outer space never cease to astound the brightest scientists nor the novice astronomer gazing at the skies from his or her own backyard. That’s especially true following an unprecedented event recently observed in the cosmos. Astronomers in Perth, Australia detected the largest explosion ever found in the universe since the Big Bang.
Researchers at the Curtin University section of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy were observing a distant galaxy cluster when they detected a huge explosion at the center of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 390 million light-years from Earth. The explosion released five times more energy than the previous universal record holder.
“We’ve seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,” said Curtin University professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt in a statement. “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.”