The largest explosion ever seen in space reveals black holes to be more influential than expected, perhaps sometimes throttling star formation in a galaxy while gobbling up trillions upon trillions of tons of gas. The eruption has been continuing for 100 million years, astronomers said Wednesday.The outburst is orchestrated by a supermassive black hole that anchors a distant galaxy sitting amid a tight cluster of galaxies. The black hole has blown two huge bubbles into the galaxy, shoving aside a colossal amount of gas equal to the mass of a trillion suns, or more than all the stars of our own Milky Way galaxy.Each bubble is many times bigger than those seen in previous studies. Here's what happens: While the black hole feasts, a lot of incoming gas is ejected violently back into the galaxy along the black hole's axis of rotation. Two high-speed jets of superheated gas carve out the ever-expanding bubbles.

The scene was captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array.The explosive event, on a scale not expected, is the sort of thing that likely occurred frequently early in the history of galaxy construction, at a time when the universe was smaller and more crowded.

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