Two difficult sources of X-rays illuminate near the Milky Way

American astronomers discovered from the data stored two mysterious light sources flashed a total of 6 times and lasted for a minute before dissolving.

A group of astronomers led by Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama, USA, found two sources of bright X-rays at the edges of the two nearby galaxies: Virgo (NGC 4636) and Centaurus A (NGC 5128). The research results are published yesterday in the journal Nature, according to the International Business Times.

Previously, scientists discovered two flashes of X-rays in a very short time with strong brightness near the galaxy NGC 4697 . Irwin and his colleagues decided to look for similar flashes of light by examining the observations of the 70 galaxies near the Milky Way of the Chandra X-ray observatory.

X-ray source (circled) near galaxy NGC 5128. (Photo: NASA).

The team identified two more light sources. A source flashed once while the other source flashed five times. Each flash of light lasted less than a minute and faded in about an hour. Light rays emit brighter than every neutron star. In particular, the light source seems to lie between the long-standing objects.

Typically, light sources can be identified through consideration of the glow time and the number of repetitions. The light does not repeat and lasts about a minute often signals the death of a giant star. But the light source must be in the young star population. Repeated rays also appear only under certain conditions that the team did not find in the strange X-ray source just discovered.

The researchers identified that X-ray sources could be a black hole undergoing some movement. "The first possibility, as the authors put it, is that there is a medium mass black hole (100-1000 times the mass of the Sun) in the center of each light source. For some reason, they emit X-rays in about an hour, another possibility is that a low-mass black hole directs X-rays to Earth, a binary star system with unpredictable orbits that can lead to repeated light rays from nearby sources. NGC 5128, " said Sergio Campana, a researcher at the Italian Institute of Astrophysics.

Campana also stressed that more observations should be made to explain X-rays, especially their repetition frequency.