Supermassive black holes behind the biggest cosmic explosions since the Big Bang

“The void of interstellar space continues to empty, one star after another,” observes NBC News . “For 80 billion light-years from Earth, three cosmic monsters are devouring stars ten times larger than the Sun.”

In a study conducted by the University of Hawaii, among others, and published this week in the journal Sciences Advances , “astronomers, after combing through data from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), announced the discovery of three supermassive black holes” feeding on giant stars.

And the explosions recorded by these scientists "when these black holes sucked in and tore apart the structure of these stars, are the most enormous since the Big Bang, which created the universe" , underlines the website of the American channel.

Dubbed “extreme nuclear transients” (ENTs), these phenomena release a colossal amount of energy, Gizmodo points out. The most powerful ENT documented by the team “released 25 times more energy than the largest known supernova.” A supernova—the explosion of a star at the end of its life—was previously the brightest and most energetic phenomenon observed in the universe.

Generally speaking, each ENT releases at once an energy equivalent to that which would be produced by “one hundred Suns over their entire 10 billion year lifespan,” explains Gizmodo .

The ENTs are not only distinguished “by their intensity and unprecedented nature. Researchers also hope that they can contribute to a better understanding of black holes and the universe that houses them,” notes The Independent .

“NTs are a valuable new tool for studying supermassive black holes in distant galaxies,” explains Benjamin Shappee, co-author of the study. “Thanks to their luminosity, we can observe them at vast cosmic distances. But in astronomy, observing from afar is like going back in time,” he adds.

He continued: by observing these ENTs, “we obtain information on the growth of black holes when the universe was half its current age, when galaxies were forming, creating stars and feeding their supermassive black holes ten times more actively than today” .