These cosmic monsters create the biggest explosions from the Big Bang

The vast emptiness of space becomes more empty one star at a time.

This is because 80 billion light from the earth, three cosmic animals devour the stars ten times the size of the sun.

In a new study by the University of Hawaii, among others, astronomers roamed data from NASA and the European space agency said they had discovered three supermassive black holes. These giants feast on stars of such a size which make that in the center of the solar system resembles a light snack.

The explosions that these scientists recorded, which occurred when these black holes shredded and sucked the fabric of these stars, are the most important from the Big Bang which created the universe.

“What I think is so exciting in this work is that we push the higher limits of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,” said Anna Payne, scientist of the staff of the Space Telescope Science and co-author of the study, in the NASA article.

Black holes are astronomical objects invisible to human eye. They have such a strong gravitational traction that they swallow everything, including light. A supermassive black hole is the largest of all black holes, sitting in the center of galaxies like the one in the heart of the Milky Way, slowly suck the planets and all the other materials towards it.

When a star is trapped in the attraction of a supermassive black hole, he can disintegrate with a spectacular explosion in a cosmic event that scientists of a new study published this week in the journal Science Advances call “an extreme nuclear transitional”.

“These events are the only way we can have a projector that we can shine on differently inactive massive holes,” said Jason Hinkle, a graduate student from the University of Hawaii, in a distinct article in NASA.

Hinkle is the main author of the new study which describes two of these events for the first time which have taken place in the last decade.

Two of the three black supermassive holes were detected in 2016 and 2018 by an ESA mission and are documented for the first time in the study. The third, nicknamed “Barbie” because of its ZTF20abrbeie catalog identifier, was identified in 2020 by a Caltech observatory in California and then documented in 2023.

The explosions are so powerful that the only cosmic event larger in amplitude was the Big Bang which sparked the dawn of the universe.

Unlike other stellar explosions, however, the way X -rays, optical light and ultraviolet rays were sifted and lit in these incidents clearly indicated that this event was a “black hole tearing a star”, said NASA article.

NASA says that black holes are in fact clearing during these cosmic events and that this brightness lasts several months.

This brightness has given scientists a new way of finding more black holes in the early distant universe. When astronomers look at the space, they look back in time because the more they seem, the more the light reaches them – the light reaching the earth of the sun, for example, has eight minutes.

“We can take these three objects as a plan to know what to look for in the future,” said Payne.