Universe's Largest & Most Terrifying Explosion Just Occurred!

If you have ever witnessed bombs going off, the explosion is mind boggling! The sound
can tear your eardrum if you are too close! The same is true of two objects in high
speed colliding! The aftermath is usually gory when people are involved. However, there
are explosions going off deep in space that will blow everything away! In fact, the most
giant explosion, bigger than you can ever imagine, has just taken place, and scientists
are excited! What is this cosmic explosion, what caused it, and how does it affect you
personally? Join us as we bring you the story of the largest explosion in the Universe
that just happened!
Space might be intriguing, but it is a scary place where lots of unimaginable things
happen. One of such things is an explosion or eruption. Cosmic explosions happen all
the time, and sometimes, we are able to fathom the spectacular events! In fact, without
these explosions, we won't be here! This is because the Universe started with a mighty
blast, the Big Bang! The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation for how the
Universe began! Here is a quick recap of how the Big Bang got us here:
Around 13.7 billion years ago, everything in the entire Universe was condensed in an
infinitesimally small singularity, a point of infinite denseness and heat. Then, suddenly,
an explosive expansion began, ballooning the Universe outwards faster than the speed
of light! According to physicist Alan Guth, this period of cosmic inflation lasted mere
fractions of a second or about 10 raised to the power of negative 32 of a second!
When cosmic inflation came to a sudden and still-mysterious end, a flood of matter and
radiation, known as "reheating," began populating our Universe with the things that
make up everything today: particles, atoms, all the particles that would become
humans, animals, rock, water, atmosphere, stars and galaxies, and so on!
Since the Big Bang, cosmic explosions have continued unabated, and we have the
biggest one since that initial explosion on record! However, before we go into this recent
explosion, what causes cosmic explosions?
Well, the most powerful kind of cosmic explosions known to science are called gamma-
ray bursts, also known as 'death from space,' and we will show you how they happen in
a bit. These galactic events are so fierce that their extraordinary intensity is only
surpassed by the Big Bang itself! In a matter of seconds, the process can emit as much
energy as a star the size of our Sun would in its entire lifetime!
These intense flashes occur all the time, but thankfully they usually take place in
galaxies billions of light-years away from Earth, sparing us from intense jets of particles
thrust at the speed of light from collapsing stars! However, because we don't get any
fore-warning of these bursts, it is not easy for scientists to observe them. Complicating
things further, these massive explosions usually only last a matter of seconds, making it
nearly impossible to act fast enough even when alerted!
Gamma-ray bursts occur when a dying star collapses to become a black hole. An
extraordinarily massive dying star can collapse its core into a black hole without
triggering a supernova. With the sudden removal of the stellar core, the upper layers of
the star come crashing down to fill in the cavity. If the star is spinning rapidly, the in-
falling material is whipped up into a swirling frenzy, and a disk forms deep inside the
star. In the ensuing vortex, superheated plasma is ensnared by highly twisted magnetic
fields.
Like an electromagnetic cannon, jets of gas blast through the star's poles and erupt into
space. The tunnel through the star forces the plasma streams into narrow cones, tightly
focusing the energy of the collapse.
Gamma-ray bursts are unique in astronomy. The most distant object seen by
astronomers is a burst whose light has been traveling for nearly the age of the Universe.
The stellar behemoth that produced it exploded shortly after the period of the first stars!
Besides, another Gamma-ray burst is the most energetic event known! It was 2.5 million
times brighter than the brightest supernova.
And supernovae, for the record, typically outshine entire galaxies! For 30 seconds in
2008, it was the most distant object visible to the naked eye, at about 7.5 billion light-
years!
Now, any gamma-ray burst you see happened a long time ago, but the light is only
reaching us now because of the vast distance! This is why they are sometimes
described as messages from the beginning of time when the most massive stars in
existence violently collapsed!
Scientists have now found the largest explosion since the Big Bang, but what about the
previously biggest explosion? To be able to fathom just how big this latest explosion is,
we will quickly look at what has now become the third largest explosion in the Universe!
That