Black Hole Blast Biggest Ever Recorded
Explosion is at least five times more powerful than previously observed events.
Andrew Fazekas
for National Geographic News
Published November 28, 2012

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11.5 billion light-years away.

The supermassive gravity well, with a mass of one to three billion suns, lurks at the core of a quasar—a class of extremely bright and energetic galaxies—dubbed SDSS J1106 1939. (See "Black Hole Blasts Superheated Early Universe.")

"We discovered the most energetic quasar outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date," said Nahum Arav, an astronomer at Virginia Tech and co-author of the study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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