Tau.Neutrino said:
Deepest X-ray Image Ever Made Contains Mysterious Explosion
Since it was launched on July 23rd, 1999, Chandra has been NASA’s flagship mission for X-ray astronomy. And this past week (on Thurs. March 30th, 2017), the Observatory accomplished something very impressive. Using its suite of advanced instruments, the observatory captured a mysterious flash coming from deep space. Not only was this the deepest X-ray source ever observed, it also revealed what could be an entirely new phenomenon.
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I want to comment on this.
All I can really say is that it’s a brilliant piece of work. I know about Chandra’s X-ray observations of Deep Field South, but had no idea that it could respond on timescales this rapid. The whole event was over in a day, meaning that whatever created the X-ray burst had to be smaller than a light-day across, no bigger than our solar system. But at the same time it’s located half way to the edge of the visible universe.
“became 1000 brighter in the space of a few hours. … legacy data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes was then consulted in order to determine the location of the CDF-S X-ray source. And scientists were able to determine that the image of the X-ray source placed it beyond any that had been observed before.”
I had no idea that Chandra could react that fast.
“X-ray bursts also come with a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which appears to be missing here.”
In other words, what we’re seeing here is a gamma ray burster without any gamma rays. Which makes it unique so far.
“A gamma ray burst can last from ten milliseconds to several hours”, so one day is actually a long duration by comparison.