Spark in the night: what broke out in a distant galaxy?

three years ago, when orbital Observatory "Chandra" surveyed a patch of sky called the Chandra Deep Field-South, the devices have detected an outbreak in a previously unremarkable spot of outer space. Something just flashed in the night and went out.

For hours 1 Oct 2014 x-rays from distant galaxies were a thousand times brighter than the ordinary light this tiny point in the constellation of the Furnace (lat. Fornax), located at a distance of 11 billion light years from Earth.

The astronomers speculated about the nature of the outbreak.

"The observed event does not correspond to any known phenomena," says Franz Bauer, an astronomer at the Catholic University of Chile and lead author of a report published in the journal Science.

The most likely explanation, which leads Dr. Bauer, is that x-rays are the afterglow from the gamma-ray burst observed from the side. It could be caused by a massive star into a black hole, collision of a pair of dense stellar remnants, called neutron stars, or gamma radiation of the galaxy in the same direction. If the beam will pass by the Earth, astronomers would see it is a weak afterglow.

"But in this case, a typical afterglow would be a hundred times more intense, if only it wasn't an unusually weak event, or an event that happened much further small galaxy," explains Bauer.

According to another version of the astronomers, it was a star torn apart by a black hole. But then the spectrum of x-rays should be different.

"What happened in that moment on the edge of the Universe? None of the known cosmic catastrophes by its characteristics does not fit to the nature of this outbreak. And the only thing that remains for us is to look for more examples," concluded the researcher.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»