Black hole explosion a ‘very cool finding’, say Derry astrophysicist Dr. Matt Nicholl

A Derry astrophysicist has described the discovery of the largest ever black hole eruption in the history of the universe as an exciting development for science.

Matt Nicholl, from Eglinton, said the observation by the European Space Agency (ESA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the largest explosion ever witnessed in the cosmos was a very significant finding.

The record-breaking eruption came from a black hole in a distant galaxy hundreds of millions of light years away. Astronomers made the discovery using X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.

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Dr. Nicholl, a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, was part of a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Boston, that in 2017 identified the nearest ‘hypernova’ - an explosion of a massive star 100 times brighter than a standard supernova - to Earth ever recorded.

Dr. Nicholl said: “From what I gather it’s a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy cluster, and the eruption must have happened a very long time ago. What we see is a ‘bubble’ in the surrounding gas that was inflated by all the energy coming off the black hole as it fed on nearby matter.

“This is a pretty common phenomenon, called an active galactic nucleus (AGN), but the energy needed to make such a large bubble suggests that at some time in its history this was the most powerful AGN in any known galaxy cluster. So a very cool finding.”

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