"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," said lead author Simona Giacintucci, director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," Giacintucci said.
Supermassive black hole
The explosion originated from the center of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Clusters of galaxies are the largest-known structures in the universe. Gravity holds these groups containing thousands of galaxies together. Astronomers believe a supermassive black hole at the heart of a large galaxy towards the center of the cluster is responsible for the explosion. Black holes don't just gobble up material, they blast it out as well -- usually in the form of jets or beams of material.