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Space Science

Telescopes Detect 'Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang' (bbc.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the unraveling-mysteries dept.
Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space -- five times bigger than anything observed before. A reader 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."
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Telescopes Detect 'Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang' More

Telescopes Detect 'Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang'

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  • Saying it in Hiroshima or Tsar Bomba units would be more comprehensible.

    • Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:14PM (#59780726)

      This explosion is notable mainly because it lasted so long. But much more intense events have been observed.

      In Sept 2015 astronomers observed the collision of two 30 solar mass black holes. During the final 20 milliseconds, three solar masses of energy were radiated as gravitation waves, which is 50 times the total output power of all the other stars in the observable universe.

      Of course, that intensity only lasted for 0.02 seconds rather than 240 million years, but still ...

      • Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:5, Informative)

        by quenda ( 644621 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @12:37AM (#59780978)

        During the final 20 milliseconds, three solar masses of energy were radiated as gravitation waves, which is 50 times the total output power of all the other stars in the observable universe.

        Of course, that intensity only lasted for 0.02 seconds rather than 240 million years, but still ...

        Solar masses is a good unit here. 5e54j is around 30 million solar masses of mass-energy. I cannot comprehend that.
        But 24 years (average) to emit the same energy as the black hole merger.

        Kind of slow. Like when I learned that the average power density of the Sun is about the same as a compost heap. Which I suppose explains how it can last billions of years.

        • Re:20 billion, billion megaton TNT (Score:4, Informative)

          by lgw ( 121541 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @12:50AM (#59781000) Journal

          We tend to think of the primary energy source in the universe as stellar fusion, because we see with light, but it's really not. Energy from gravitational collapse completely dominates, it's just mostly in gravity waves and neutrinos, and very bursty. Fusion lasts a long time, as you say because it's slow.

      • I know it's Slashdot, but try reading the summary. It didn't last 240 million years.
    • It is like burning about a thousand billion, billion Hiroshimas to a crisp without any legitimate military need.

      • Literally ONLY in Murica.

        Go tell that to the mutating babies whose crispy-black skin literally fell off, you complete piece of shit.

      • But militarily needless massacres are just the right thing for reviving flagging presidential re-election campaigns - something that the Pussy-Grabber In Chief would do well to remember over the coming 6 months. And in his future re-election campaigns, until he makes the post hereditary and the "election" a pro forma.

  • Biggest, but not best (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChatHuant ( 801522 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:27PM (#59780742)

    The best bang since the big one remains Eccentrica Gallumbits...

  • So... what they are saying is... (Score:3)

    by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:28PM (#59780744)

    There is a force strong enough to escape a black-hole... by totally ripping it apart! Like a galactic fart! Or a universal fart as a supermassive might exceed the size of a galaxy... the scale is so big how would we define such a fart? This has to be bigger than the elephant that lifted dad up!

    Well Hawking radiation escapes so we kinda already knew somethings escaped. Would that be lady fart Hawking Radiation?

    And they say... nothing escapes a black hole... not even light... well except farts... those escape even the most massive of bodies!!!

    • Well Hawking radiation escapes so we kinda already knew somethings escaped.

      1. Hawking Radiation is a theoretical prediction that has never been observed.

      2. The Hawking Radiation from a one solar mass black hole would be equal to emitting one electron every 3 million years. The bigger the black hole, the weaker the radiation.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        1. Hawking Radiation is a theoretical prediction that has never been observed

        The theoretical basis for Hawking radiation is very solid, though. I don't think any physicist believes black holes are at absolute zero now. The mechanism is perhaps debatable, but not the core idea that black holes have temperature.

        How incredibly long it will take even small black holes to decay drives home just how early we are in the lifetime of the universe. Unless the Big Rip comes sooner than expected (and that's a debatable fate, to be sure), we're in the first epoch that could support life (as we

        • >then the rest of time will just be decaying black holes.

          Then the last black hole will decay to nothing and all that is left is photons - no matter - no gravity. Without the gravity the space of the universe becomes scale independent and is equivalent to the low entropy start of the big bang. So it starts over.

          That's what Roger told me anyway. Seems legit.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            It can't start over unless the universe collapses back into a singularity (not going to happen) or pops out of existence and another universe forms in its place within the bulk. The big bang wasn't an explosion, it was/is an expansion of the entire universe and space-time itself.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by lgw ( 121541 )

              He's referring to Penrose's Cyclic Cosmology. I'm noy sure that Penrose believes it himself, but the theoretical basis does make sense (with a couple caveats). If there are no massive particles left in the universe, then the universe ceases to have scale, and there's no difference between a massively expanded universe and a singularity. The math works, anyhow, though it depends on proton decay, and a bit of hand-waving about neutrinos.

              • He's smarter than I am and I like the theory for its internal consistency. I read his book a few years ago so I must be some kind of expert.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by lgw ( 121541 )

                  I really liked his book. Mostly, I like the fact that someone is thinking big, and not just iterating on the consensus view. Cosmology, of all disciplines, needs people who think big.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            But photons do have mass, just not rest mass. Anything that carries energy has mass.

            OTOH, ISTM these photons would become uniformly distributed in locations and uniform in energy level (frequency) over enough time. (Unless the universe isn't within it's own Schwarzschild radius.)

            That said, this doesn't account for either dark energy or dark matter. Which would require more understanding than we currently have. But if dark matter doesn't decay, then the photons wouldn't become uniformly distributed. And

      • Supermassive black hole decay is the one and only time you get to use 'googolyears' as a serious unit.

    • And they say... nothing escapes a black hole... not even light... well except farts... those escape even the most massive of bodies!!!

      Like Roseanne Barr?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If ever there was a measure of how far Slashdot has fallen intellectually, it must surely be the fact someone just use the word fart about 20 times in a single post in a woefully ineffectual attempt at being funny.

      Your post audience must surely be people with an IQ of about 20. That's definitely not the IQ of the average Slashdot of yesteryear.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Nah. That just means he's (almost certainly a male) in his late teenage years or possibly early 20's. It doesn't have much to do with intellectual skills, only social ones. And typical slashdot posters have always been deficient in that. (Look up the "hot grits" threads, e.g.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by doogles ( 103478 ) *

          Nah. That just means he's (almost certainly a male) in his late teenage years or possibly early 20's. It doesn't have much to do with intellectual skills, only social ones. And typical slashdot posters have always been deficient in that. (Look up the "hot grits" threads, e.g.)

          Hot grits. Holy cow, what a callback to The Good Old Days(tm).

      • ... you always wanted.

        By implying people are retarded, until they succumbed, and now actually are.

        Have fun; we'll be reclaiming the wasteland in 50 years. :)

  • Impressive on a human scale (Score:5, Funny)

    by Blackeneth ( 210087 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:33PM (#59780754)

    From the paper, the energy released was 5E+61 ergs, or 5E+54 Joules.

    Incredibly, this amount of energy is equal to TWO roundhouse kicks to the face from Chuck Norris.

  • Units! (Score:5, Informative)

    by drkshadow ( 6277460 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:27PM (#59780854)

    "20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second"

    a megaton of TNT is 4.184Ã--10^15 J. A watt is 1J/s. So, this is 20 * 10^9 * 10^9 * 10^15 joules of energy every 1/1000s, or 2*10^37J/s -- watts.

    "The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona is the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, [... with a] generating capacity of about 3,937 MW."

    This is 2*10^37W / (3.937 * 10^9W), or 5 * 10^27 of the largest nuclear power stations in the US.

    The sun outputs 384.6 yotta watts (3.846Ã--10^26 watts). Then, this celestial body is pumping out energy at a rate 10^11 times as strong as our sun. We're at a radius about 93,000,000 miles, so to be in this body's comfort zone, we'd have to be .. 4.85*10^13 miles away? "Pluto's average distance from the Sun is 3,670,050,000 miles" -- My, what balmy weather Pluto would be having!

    "The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km" This amounts to 1.45*10^17 mi. That extra 15 000 from the ideal position of the habitable zone doesn't seem to bad.. if we were in the Canis Major dwarf galaxy, and this object were at the center of the Milky Way, perhaps much of the galaxy next door to us would be in the Goldilocks zone!

    Anyway, 2*10^37J/s. The sun is expected to output 10^44J of energy in its lifetime. Then, if the sun were burning with so much energy output, it would last about 5*10^6 seconds. About two months.

    If you converted the entire moon to energy, you would get approximately 10^39 J. In two minutes, this celestial event will have output as much energy as if you converted the moon from matter to energy.

    So, who says it's difficult to put into knowable terms how much energy this is? (Geesh.. these terms don't really make sense.)

    • In two minutes, this celestial event will have output as much energy as if you converted the moon from matter to energy.

      Talk about getting mooned.

      What about the Libraries-of-Congresses-to-matter metric?

    • “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  • The trippy part... (Score:5, Informative)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:37PM (#59780872) Journal

    ...is that this could have happened in our galaxy 100,000 years ago and it might be we find out tomorro-

  • Seems like (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @12:02AM (#59780916) Journal

    A Conjoiner drive exploding.

  • bigger explosions that we haven't seen yet because they happened further away from us

  • This is just Mark Fuckerberg after he ate at Chipotle.

  • "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."

    Oh, I get it!

    "So that's incomprehensibly big. Huge."

    No, I get it. "It probably didn't."

  • All we know is it's the biggest we've seen so far, unless someone's calculated the maximum possible post-Big-Bang explosion and this is it. Which I doubt.

    • All we know is it's the biggest we've seen so far, unless someone's calculated the maximum possible post-Big-Bang explosion and this is it. Which I doubt.

      Yes that is true, though this has the interesting property that the larger they are, the more likely we are to see them.

  • The energy to make the Ophiuchus Concavity is 5*10^61 ergs according to the paper. The average energy output of the entire Observable Universe is estimated at 10,000 FOE/sec where a "FOE" is astrophysicist shorthand for 10^51 ergs (ten to the Fifty One Ergs - FOE) and is about equal to the output of one supernova. So it is 10^55 ergs/sec. It takes the Observable Universe two months to put out this much energy.

  • Surely every large number can be made more explicable by measuring it in terms of football fields.

  • Big bang "theory" never has been proven.

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