Although outer space is full of enigmatic phenomena, one galaxy in particular has baffled experts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The space agency is now investigating a galaxy detected 570 million light-years away that periodically erupts every 114 days. Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which first observed the eruption, said the eruption has occurred for 20 times so far.
“These are the most frequent and predictable recurring wavelength bursts we have seen from the core of a galaxy and offer us a unique opportunity to study this extragalactic Old Fidel in detail. We believe that a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy creates the bursts as it partially consumes a giant star in orbit, “said Anna Payne, a NASA fellow at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
Three possible explanations
As a result, NASA had submitted three possible explanations for the explosion called ASASSN-14ko. The first is that it is caused by interactions between the discs of two orbiting black holes. Recent data show that the two black holes exist, but they do not appear to orbit close enough to cause outbreaks. The second possibility is that a passing star was intercepted by the black hole, but since the flares have been consistent in their shape, scientists consider it unlikely. The third and most plausible explanation speaks of a partial tidal interruption event, when a star gets too close to a black hole and matter is continuously siphoned. The orbit of the star is not circular, that is, each time it approaches the black hole it approaches and exhausts too much.
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“ASASSN-14ko is currently our best example of periodic variability in an active galaxy, despite decades of other claims, because the timing of its lapses is very constant over the six years of data Anna and her team analyzed.” , said astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies black holes but was not involved in the research. “This result is a real tour de force of multi-wavelength observational astronomy,” NASA said in a statement.
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