The farthest source of X-rays ever discovered has become a great mystery

Astronomers search for X-ray sources in the Universe over sixty years, and it can be seen in stars, gas clouds, destructive events ... and everything got a little easier after the deployment of space telescopes dedicated to observations As is the case with the Chandra Observatory.

Since its launch on July 23, 1999, Chandra has been NASA's primary X-ray instrument. But on March 30, 2017, Chandra was able to draw even more attention from astronomers.

Using its set of advanced instruments, the observatory captured a mysterious glow from deep space. This brightness would become the most distant source of X-ray ever seen, and in addition, something entirely new.

Located in the sky region known as Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), this X-ray emission source appears to have come from a small galaxy located about 10.7 billion light years from Earth. It also had some remarkable properties, such as producing (in a matter of seconds) more energy than all the stars in a galaxy.

By 2014, a team of researchers at Penn State University, Chilean PUC, had already detected such a source, but not through X-rays. But still, it caught the attention of the team because during a rash it became about 1,000 times brighter in a matter of hours. From there, researchers began collecting data using the advanced Chandra Observatory spectrometer.

After being detected during an intense glow, the X-ray source became dim and disappeared, but astronomers had enough time to record information with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Now, thousands of data will be analyzed to determine the exact location, but you can already see that it is the most distant X-ray source ever detected so far! On the other hand, it is not known what would have caused immense brightness and emission of energy.

The mysterious source of X-rays could be the result of some kind of destructive event, or something that scientists have never seen before. And the strangest thing is that such X-ray bursts are usually followed by bursts of gamma rays, which seems to be missing in this case.

So far, three possible explanations for the strange origin of this phenomenon have been suggested: in the first, the X-ray source (called CDF-S) is in fact the result of a star collapsing or melting, The resulting gamma are not pointed at Earth; In the second hypothesis, the same scenario is responsible for the X-ray source, but the gamma-ray burst is beyond the small galaxy; And the third possible explanation would be that the event would have been caused by a medium-sized black hole during the destruction of a white dwarf star.

During the 17 years of operation of the Chandra Space Observatory, astronomers had never seen anything like it. An X-ray source like this has never been observed by any other observatory anywhere in the Universe. In addition, this phenomenon occurred faster and in a smaller galaxy than other unexplained events previously observed.

In the end, the most plausible (but not 100% reliable) explanation is that the event was probably the result of something cataclysmic, such as a neutron star or a white dwarf being shattered. But the fact that the data does not match this or any other explanation makes it appear that astronomers have witnessed a whole new kind of cataclysmic event.

Both Chandra and other observatories operating on the X-ray, such as ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst, will make further searches to find other examples of similar events. We have to hope for the unlikely to happen again.