Ophiuchus Supercluster is a nearby galaxy supercluster in the constellation

Ophiuchus Ophiuchus () is a large constellation straddling the celestial equator. Its name comes from the Ancient Greek (), meaning "serpent-bearer", and it is commonly represented as a man grasping a snake. The serpent is represented by the constell ...

. The supercluster forms the far wall of the Ophiuchus Void; it may also be connected in a filament with the Pavo-Indus-Telescopium Supercluster and the

Hercules Supercluster The Hercules Superclusters (SCl 160) refers to a set of two nearby superclusters of galaxies. Relative to other local superclusters, Hercules is considered particularly large, being approximately 330 Mly in diameter. The Northern Local Supervoid ...

. This supercluster is centered on the cD cluster (Abell class type I) Ophiuchus Cluster, and has at least two more galaxy clusters, four more galaxy groups, and several field galaxies as members. In February 2020, astronomers reported that a 1.5 million light-year wide cavity in the Ophiuchus Supercluster originated from the central galaxy of the Ophiuchus Cluster. The cD galaxy,

NeVe 1 NeVe 1 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy and the central, dominant member of the Ophiuchus Cluster, about 411 million light-years away from Earth behind the Zone of Avoidance region of the sky. It is notable for being the host galaxy of the Op ...

, is the site of the Ophiuchus Supercluster eruption, triggered by the ejection of ~270 million solar masses from the

supermassive black hole A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical obj ...

of NeVe 1. This may be the largest known explosion in the

Universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. A ...

since the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from t ...

Discovery

Ken-ichi Wakamatsu of

Gifu University is a national university in the city of Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. It is sometimes abbreviated as Gidai (岐大) or Gifudai (岐阜大). National University Corporation The Tokai National Higher Education and Research System established ...

and Matthew Malkan discovered Ophiuchus Cluster in 1981 on Palomar Schmidt IV-N Plates during a hidden globular cluster survey. Perhaps, determining characteristics of a supercluster will help to more correctly explain the excess velocity component of the local group of galaxies.

References

Galaxy superclusters Ophiuchus (constellation) {{supercluster-stub Black holes