While space is full of puzzling phenomena, one particular galaxy has left experts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) puzzled. The space agency is now investigating a galaxy spotted 570 million light-years away and periodically erupting every 114 days. Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which first observed the eruption, said the eruption has occurred 20 times so far.
“These are the most predictable and frequently recurring multi-wavelength bursts we’ve seen from the core of a galaxy, and they give us a unique opportunity to study this extra-galactic Old Faithful in detail. We believe a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy is causing the eruptions because it partially consumes a spinning giant star, ”said Anna Payne, a Nasa Graduate Fellow at the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa in a statement.
Three possible explanations
In the aftermath, NASA had set out three possible explanations for the eruption, called ASASSN-14ko. The first is that it is caused by interactions between the disks of two orbiting black holes. Recent data shows that the two black holes exist, but they don’t seem to orbit close enough to trigger the flares. The second possibility is that a passing star was intercepted by the black hole, but given that the flares are consistent with respect to their shape, scientists consider this unlikely. The third and most plausible explanation concerns a partial tidal disturbance, when a star gets too close to a black hole and matter is constantly being discharged. The star’s orbit is not circular, which means that every time it approaches the black hole, it gets closer and more mass is depleted.
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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 the eruptions is very consistent over the six years of data that Anna and her team analyzed,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies black holes but was not involved in the study. “This result is a true tour de force of multi-wavelength observational astronomy,” NASA said in a statement.
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