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From its perch on the International Space Station, NASA's NICER X-ray telescope has helped map a mysterious cosmic event for the first time.
It happened in a galaxy 300 million light-years away. Astronomers call this system Ansky.
Ansky produces a type of recurring X-ray outburst called a QPE, or quasi-periodic eruption. These events were just recently discovered. Ansky is only the eighth known QPE emitter and is the most energetic to date.
Some scientists think QPEs occur when a lower-mass object orbits a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. When the smaller object passes through the disk of gas around the monster black hole, it produces a cloud of debris that causes an X-ray outburst.
The low-mass object isn't on a circular orbit, and its motion is affected by the distortion of space-time near the black hole, so the eruptions don't repeat
over the same exact time frame, which is what makes them quasi-periodic.
Ansky’s outbursts are the longest of all the QPEs astronomers have studied, with eruptions every 4.5 days or so that last approximately one-and-a-half days.
That may be caused by a larger disk engulfing an object farther away.
NICER’s observations of Ansky allowed scientists to probe the gas ejected from the disk after each collision. They show that it's expelling around a Jupiter’s worth of gas each time. The gas expands, reaching velocities about 15% the speed of light, and produces the X-rays we see as QPEs.
NICER and other missions will continue to study Ansky and other QPEs, helping astronomers reveal their secrets.
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[NASA]