SCIENTISTS have been left baffled by mysterious bursts of energy coming from deep space – and think it could be the first ever detection of the shockwave from two colliding stars.
This mysterious cosmic event occurred 130million light-years away from Earth and was detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory – an orbiting space telescope.
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The intense burst has been likened to a sonic boom, which is caused when a fast plane breaks the sound barrier.
And researchers at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University have now suggested there could be two possible explanations for the mystery signal, Mashable reports.
The first possible explanation, is that it is the aftershock of the massive collision of two superdense stars called neutron stars.
Neutron stars are believed to be the densest objects in the universe – with just a fist-sized amount weighing billions of tons.
The astronomers say two of these stars collided in a ‘kilonova’ event, creating an extremely bright blast in 2017, but the new mysterious signal could be the first ever detection of an “afterglow” of the collision.
After the kilonova explosion, debris from the two objects could have “blasted” into space, heating up its surrounding gas and stardust.
The aftermath of the collision would cause the cosmic event that scientists are seeing now which ha been dubbed a “kilonova glow.”
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Another explanation for the intense energy burst is a black hole that is sucking in matter from the star explosion.
Whenever debris falls into the black hole, it could possibly be releasing energy.
Experts will determine what the cause of the blast is by examining the light, or radiation, that the reaction is emitting.
Neither of these scenarios has ever been observed before, astronomers say.
“The real reason I’m scientifically excited is because we might see something more from the plane,” astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti said to Beam Media.
“We might finally get some information about the new compact object.”
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