Crossing 500 million years of light, a signal in the form of an X-ray explosion rocks Earth’s astronomy.
According to SciTech Daily, the incredibly powerful signal mentioned above was discovered by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space telescope shaped like a swallow.
The signal is highly unusual: Instead of fading away as expected, it shines brightly for 7-10 days before dimming, then brightening again, and dimming once more. This pattern repeats every 25 days.
But it’s not a message from extraterrestrial beings.
A Star’s Misfortune and the Monstrous Black Hole – Graphic from SCITECH DAILY
In a reverse detective work, a group of scientists led by Dr. Phil Evans from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy determined that the anomalous signal came from 2MASX J02301709+2836050, a galaxy located 500 million light-years away from Earth.
And it’s a signal from the afterlife: the final scream of a giant star slowly being “shredded” apart.
Using astronomical models, the authors concluded that the X-ray burst source, named Swift J0230, represents a star similar in size to our Sun, orbiting in an elliptical path around the central black hole of the galaxy.
Each time it approaches the narrow section of its orbit, where the star comes too close to the black hole, it gets gradually “shredded” by this cosmic “monster.”
Measurements show that during each “shredding,” the black hole consumes an enormous amount of matter, equivalent to 3 times the mass of our planet.
The black hole itself has a mass ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 times that of the Sun, making it a “monster” black hole (i.e., a supermassive black hole) but one of the smallest in the world of central galaxy black holes.
For comparison, the Sagittarius A* black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy contains the mass equivalent of 4 million Suns.