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While outer space is teeming with enigmatic phenomena, one galaxy in particular has left experts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) perplexed. The space agency is currently investigating a galaxy spotted 570 million light years away that erupts periodically every 114 days. Neil Gehrels’ Swift Observatory and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which first observed the explosion, said the eruption has occurred 20 times so far.
“These are the most predictable and frequent recurring multi-wavelength flares that we have seen from the heart of a galaxy, and they give us a unique opportunity to study this extragalactic Old Faithful in detail. We believe that a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy creates the bursts because it partially consumes a giant star in orbit, ”Anna Payne, NASA graduate fellow at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, said in a statement.
Three possible explanations
In the process, NASA presented 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 shows that both black holes exist, but they don’t appear to orbit close enough to cause the eruptions. The second possibility is that a passing star has been intercepted by the black hole, but since the flares have been consistent in shape, scientists deem this unlikely. The third and most plausible explanation is for a partial tidal disturbance event, when a star gets too close to a black hole and matter is continually siphoned off. The star’s orbit is not circular, which means that every time it gets closer to the black hole, it gets closer and more mass is depleted.
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“ASASSN-14kb is currently our best example of periodic variability in an active galaxy, despite decades of other claims, as the timing of its eruptions is very consistent over the six years of data analyzed by Anna and her team,” 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 research. “This result is a real tour de force of multi-wavelength observational astronomy,” NASA said in a statement.
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