Astronomers have spotted a humungous explosion in the universe that is thought to be the biggest ever seen by humans.

The huge blast happened in the Ophiuchus cluster, which is a whopping 390 million light-years away from Earth, according to the Astrophysical Journal.

Experts believe the explosion was a black hole in one of the galaxies of the cluster, which are huge structures of thousands of individual galaxies that are held together by gravity.

Simona Giacintucci, the lead author of the study at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, described the explosion as like a volcano erupting.

“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain,” she said.

“A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”

Study co-author Maxim Markevitch, of NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, added: “The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove.

“This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”

Black holes are normally quiet and invisible, but when material is falling into them they can “blaze with radiation”.

During this period, it sucks up plasma from the cluster until it’s full, which is then followed by a huge outburst where it shoots out jets of plasma.

Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, the lead author on the paper described this one as “extraordinarily energetic”.

“We’ve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,” she said.

“We don’t know why it’s so big but it happened very slowly like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years.”

NASA has said it has found water ice deposits on Mars that is so close to the surface astronauts could dig it up with a spade.

The US space agency released a map showing where the ice is this week as they plan the best spot to land humans on the Red Planet.

Not only do researchers want to study what is in the ice, but they also believe it could be a source of drinking water for humans on Mars, as well as to create rocket fuel.

NASA’s Sylvain Piqueux said: “You wouldn’t need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel.

“We’re continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land.”

The map was put together by experts after studying data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Another key discovery the spacecrafts have made is finding evidence that Mars’ Jezero Crater has hydrated silica in it.

This mineral is good for preserving evidence of life, meaning if there is or was alien life on Mars, this will show proof of it.

Researchers hope that data gathered by the Mars 2020 rover will allow them to get their best evidence for whether there is life on the planet, as well as how the minerals came to be in the crater.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Letters, experts explained that hydrated silica holds water within its crystal structure.

On Earth, it can form in a number of different environments, such as volcanic glass and the ocean floor.

And because hydrated silica is one of the hardest minerals in existence, it is exceptionally good at preserving softer minerals that get inside it.

Study author Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at Brown University in the US, said: “The oldest evidence – definitive evidence – of microfossils that we have on Earth are usually found in silica.”

The 250-million-year old remains of a strange dragon-like creature have been dug up by archeologists in Russia.

The beast is apparently a kind of prehistoric version of the Komodo dragon – creatures that are native to the Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang.

The bones show the creature had a giant head with massive teeth inside its mouth that have been described as similar to “steak knives” that would have been able to tear its prey to shreds.

After its fossilised bones, which were dug up 45 miles from the city of Orenburg on the Ural River, were examined, experts determined it is from a group of reptiles known as erythrosuchids.

The animal – called Garjainia – would have been 10ft tall and roamed around diverse areas of the globe, including eastern Europe, South Africa, India and China.

However, this would have been because it was alive at the time of the supercontinent Pangaea – before Earth’s landmass had broken apart into the continents we know today.

Lead author of the study where the findings were pubished, Dr Richard Butler, of the University of Birmingham, said it was all the more surprising that the remains were so well preserved.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, he said: “Erythrosuchids are large, predatory meat-eating reptiles that lived shortly after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction, the largest ecological crisis in Earth history.”

The mass dying event happened 252 million years ago and wiped out nearly every species on the planet after volcanoes in Siberia erupted and turned the oceans into acid.

Erythrosuchids – also known as “red crocodiles” because of their incredibly long bodies and giant teeth – would have existed just a few million years before dinosaurs.

This means they would have been the dominant predator on land.

They also would have head disproportionately massive heads – with skulls dwarfing those that dinosaurs had.

Dr Butler continued: “Erythrosuchids were superficially similar to Komodo dragons, that lived in the Triassic, 250 to 240 million years ago.

“One of the key results of this paper is we demonstrate numerically for the first time that erythrosuchids have hugely oversized heads relative to the rest of the body.

“Proportionately, their skulls are probably larger than any other group of living or fossil reptiles.

“In appearance, they looked a bit like a Komodo dragon – walking on four legs.

“But they had very large heads relative to their body, with powerful jaws and large, sharp, steak-knife-like teeth.

“They lived just prior to the very first dinosaurs, so erythrosuchids and dinosaurs did not live alongside one another, as far as we know.”

Dr Butler added: “These results provide support for the generalisation that the heads of erythrosuchids are disproportionately large relative to other groups of archosauromorphs.

“The enlarged heads were acquired coincident with increases in overall body size, and anatomical features related to carnivorous adaptations such as serrated teeth.”

An international team has suggested asteroids striking Earth may have sparked the growth of life after the so-called “essential building blocks of life” were found inside space rocks.

Scientists have confirmed that sugars, which are key biological compounds for supporting life, have been discovered inside asteroids.

These include ribose and other bio-essential sugars such as arabinose and xylose – all of which are essential for the proteins to be built that carry out life processes.

According to the findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal today (November 18), it means it is an asteroid bombardment may have begun life as we know it on Earth.

Lead study author Yoshihiro Furukawa, of Tohoku University, Japan, said: “Other important building blocks of life have been found in meteorites previously, including amino acids (components of proteins) and nucleobases (components of DNA and RNA), but sugars have been a missing piece among the major building blocks of life.

“The research provides the first direct evidence of ribose in space and the delivery of the sugar to Earth.

“The extraterrestrial sugar might have contributed to the formation of RNA on the prebiotic Earth which possibly led to the origin of life.”

Co-author Jason Dworkin, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, added: “It is remarkable that a molecule as fragile as ribose could be detected in such ancient material.

“These results will help guide our analyses of pristine samples from primitive asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, to be returned by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.”

While DNA is the very basis of life, it is now believed RNA, which also has the ability to carry instructions on how to create and operate a living organism, may have predated DNA.

DNA then eventually came to replace RNA as the base structure for the formation of life.

“The sugar in DNA (2-deoxyribose) was not detected in any of the meteorites analyzed in this study,” explained Danny Glavin, another co-author at NASA Goddard.

“This is important since there could have been a delivery bias of extraterrestrial ribose to the early Earth which is consistent with the hypothesis that RNA evolved first.”