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To the naked eye, galactic cluster 3C438 looks like any other patch of starry sky. But the Chandra space telescope's X-ray vision paints an extremely different picture-bursting from the cluster's center is a cloud of energy equivalent to 1 billion exploding Suns, an event that may be universe's most energetic ever detected.
Astronomers who made the discovery have whittled down the cause of the cosmic energy burst to two suspects. They think either two dense galaxies are colliding at 4 million mph, or a super-massive black hole is swallowing the mass of 100 stars each year.
"In either scenario, this is one of the most extreme events in the local Universe," the astronomers write in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
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