• March 29, 2024

NASA Witnesses Cataclysmic Event But Don’t Know What It Is

NASA saw a burst of x-rays from a galaxy billions of light years from the Earth that was thousands of times more than our whole universe contains but it totally disappeared within 24 hours.  That type of x-ray release is known to occur when a star collapses or two black holes merge.  But scientists believe this could be a type of cataclysmic event they have never witnessed before.

NASA said in a statement:

“A mysterious flash of X-rays has been discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in the deepest X-ray image ever obtained.”

 “This source likely comes from some sort of destructive event in space, but may be of a variety that scientists have never seen before.”

Kevin Schawinski, a Swiss astrophysicist who coauthored the report on the event noted that it may very well be an event never witnessed before but he warns that a lot more study must be done before anyone should come to that conclusion.

The X-ray source, located in a region of the sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), produced a thousand times more energy than all the stars in this galaxy for a few minutes before fading away completely below the detection of Chandra after about a day.

Thousands of hours of legacy data from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes helped determine that the event likely came from a faint, small galaxy about 10.7 billion light-years from Earth.

Possible explanations for the strange X-ray flashes included gamma-ray burst events, which are jetted explosions triggered either by the collapse of a massive star or by the merger of a neutron star with another neutron star or a black hole, according to Gadgets 360.

If the jet was pointing toward Earth, the burst of gamma rays could have been detected.

It must be really annoying to know an event took place and although you witnessed it, you have no idea what it was.

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