NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a mysterious cosmic explosion in space, and according to scientists, this flash of X-rays most likely resulted from a “completely new type of cataclysmic event.”
The X-ray source was located in the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) region in space. This source, prior to October 2014, was not detected in X-rays, but then it became about factor of 1,000 brighter in a few hours, before fading below the sensitivity of Chandra X-ray Observatory a day later.
Scientists reached the conclusion that the event likely came from a small galaxy located about 10.7 billion light years from Earth.
“Ever since discovering this source, we’ve been struggling to understand its origin,” said Franz Bauer of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Chile.
“It’s like we have a jigsaw puzzle but we don’t have all of the pieces.”
According to researchers, possible explanations for the CDF-S X-ray source include: (1) a GRB is not pointed toward Earth, (2) a GRB that lies beyond the small galaxy, and (3) a medium-sized black hole shredded a white dwarf star.
“None of these ideas fits the data perfectly,” said co-author Ezequiel Treister of the Pontifical Catholic University, “but then again, we’ve rarely if ever seen any of the proposed possibilities in actual data, so we don’t understand them well at all.”
“We may have observed a completely new type of cataclysmic event,” said co-author Kevin Schawinski, of ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
“Whatever it is, a lot more observations are needed to work out what we’re seeing.”
The detailed results of this study have been published in the June 2017 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which is available online.
The Chandra program is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The flight operations are controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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