Astronomers Explain What Caused the Largest Cosmic Explosion Ever Seen

By measuring the light being split up into different wavelengths, we were able to measure the distance, which comes out at around 8 billion light years. So that means this has happened more than half the age of the universe ago. So when you know how far away it is and we can see how bright it looks to us, that tells you how bright it must be or must have been there, the real location. A giant cloud of material far bigger than a normal star that is being shredded by or partially shredded by the black hole and that shredding is sending some kind of shock through the rest of the cloud. That shock is about 100 times the size of our solar system, so it's absolutely gargantuan. If you've got something that big that's twice the temperature of our sun, that's going to glow very, very, very brightly. And that's what we think we've seen.

We don't have very good data on that part of the universe, because it's just so far away that everything there is so faint. But if there is a galaxy any larger than kind of our own Milky Way there, then we would have seen it in our pre-existing images, but we don't see it. So that's confusing and we're going to have to point bigger and more sensitive telescopes once the explosion fades away to try and understand what the environment is in that part of the universe.