While outer space is full of enigmatic phenomena, a certain galaxy has left experts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) puzzled. The space agency is now investigating a galaxy spotted 570 million light-years away that erupts periodically every 114 days. Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which first observed the outbreak, said the eruption has occurred 20 times so far.
“These are the most predictable and frequent recurring focal lengths we have seen from the core of a galaxy and give us a unique opportunity to study this ancient extragalactic believer in detail. We believe that a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy creates explosions because it partially consumes a giant star in orbit, ”said Anna Payne, a graduate of the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa.
Three possible explanations
Later, NASA presented three possible explanations for the outbreak called ASASSN-14ko. The first is that it is caused by the interactions between the disks of two orbiting black holes. Recent data show that the two black holes exist, but do not appear to orbit tight enough to cause rockets. The second possibility is that a passing star was intercepted by the black hole, but since the flames were consistent in their shape, scientists consider this unlikely. The third and most plausible explanation speaks of an event of partial interruption of the tides, when a star gets too close to a black hole and the matter is continuously wrinkled. The orbit of the star is not circular, ie each time it approaches the black hole, more mass approaches and 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 its flame schedule is very consistent over the six years of data that Anna and her team analyzed them, ”said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies black holes but has not been involved in research. “This result is a real showcase of wavelength observational astronomy,” NASA said in a statement.
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