I heard about this from Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the Stephen Colbert show last night.

Does anyone know what caused this?  The "bang" or gamma ray burst was so giant that it carved a hole 1.5 million light years wide through a galaxy cluster.  The article says nothing about the mass of the supermassive black hole.  It must be tens of billions of solar masses, maybe the result of the merger of 2 ultra massive black holes during a galaxy collision?  Any ideas?  Is was a quasar for hundreds of millions of years, to produce that cavity.  Why do they call that a "bang"?  It was a giant quasar.

“But it happened very slowly – like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years.”

"Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster say they have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.   It came from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth, and released five times more energy than the previous record holder..."

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/biggest-bang-since-the-big-bang

 

 

Edited March 8, 20205 yr by Airbrush

"The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster exhibits a curious concave gas density discontinuity at the edge of its cool core. It was discovered in the Chandra X-ray image by Werner and collaborators, who considered a possibility of it being a boundary of an AGN-inflated bubble located outside the core, but discounted this possibility because it required much too powerful an AGN outburst. Using low-frequency (72-240 MHz) radio data from MWA GLEAM and GMRT, we found that the X-ray structure is, in fact, a giant cavity in the X-ray gas filled with diffuse radio emission with an extraordinarily steep radio spectrum. It thus appears to be a very aged fossil of the most powerful AGN outburst seen in any galaxy cluster..."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01291

What does it take to blow a giant AGN-inflated bubble that is 1.5 million light years across?  No mention of the depth of this, only the width.  So an ultra-massive quasar blasts away for hundreds of millions of years, why NOT such a big bubble?  The gap is about 3/4 the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Edited March 26, 20205 yr by Airbrush