Something Blew Up and we have No Idea What It Is. 10-21-16

Something Blew Up

by: Casey McCauley

Dr. Jimmy Irwin, UA associate professor of physics and astronomy detected several occasions of massive flares of energy in X-ray binary stars in two separate galaxies. These flares in energy are unlike anything scientists have ever seen before. Most galaxies collapse and are destroyed when experiencing this amount of energy resulting in a supernova or large gamma ray bursts. But these galaxies are doing something quite different. The two stars flare to the verge of exploding, only to simmer to baseline energy in an hour. They repeat the process every few days.

Dr. Irwin explains, "We've seen this kind of huge variability where there's an energy uplift of 100 in less than a minute, but the object is usually destroyed," Irwin said. "Whatever these objects are -- we don't know just yet -- there's some sort of undiscovered mechanism by which compact objects can accrete matter from a companion star."

Chandra X-Ray Observatory

There are many different theories on what could be happening here. Some think it's a black hole, others thing it's a neutron star, whatever it is, it has been confirmed to be so rare, that no sign of one has been ever reported in our galaxy.  Irwin states that the flares have been occurring in globular clusters which implies that it could possibly be a neutron star or an intermediate black hole. "It's possible that it's a somewhat larger intermediate mass black hole, tens of thousands times more massive than our sun,"

Whatever it is, scientists have never seen anything like this, Irwin and his team are currently studying the flares and trying to predict a pattern or sequence in which they happen so they can be easily studied. Once that happens, we will be able to learn what makes these things happen.