Top 10 list - largest explosions

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#7 - Tsar Bomba was a hydrogen bomb developed by the Soviet Union, and tested on October 30, 1961. With a yield of 57 megatons, it was the most powerful man-made explosion ever. The bomb was actually originally intended to be more around 100 megatons, but the fallout of such a device would have been too problematic. Even though Tsar Bomba was detonated in the very remote location of the Novaya Zemlya island chain, north of the Russian mainland, it still caused a great deal of collateral damage. A village 55 km from the test site was completely leveled

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#2 - GRB 080916C was a gamma-ray burst that was first recorded on September 16, 2008. The burst occurred about 12.2 billion light-years away and lasted 23 minutes, which is a very long duration for a gamma-ray burst. For those 23 minutes, the gamma-ray burst was putting out more energy than most galaxy superclusters. It is estimated that the blast had the equivalent amount of energy of 2 x 10^1038 tons of TNT. That’s the same as a trillion Tsar Bombas going off every second for 110 billion years or about 7,000 times the amount of energy that the Sun is expected to put out in its lifetime.

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