NASA’s Swift Discovers an Unusual Source of Light Using data - TopicsExpress



          

NASA’s Swift Discovers an Unusual Source of Light Using data from NASA’s Swift satellite and observations from many other facilities, an international team of astronomers has discovered an unusual source of light in a galaxy some 90 million light-years away. The object’s curious properties make it a good match for a supermassive black hole ejected from its home galaxy after merging with another giant black hole. But astronomers can’t yet rule out an alternative possibility. The source, called SDSS1133, may be the remnant of a massive star that erupted for a record period of time before destroying itself in a supernova explosion. “With the data we have in hand, we can’t yet distinguish between these two scenarios,” said lead researcher Michael Koss, an astronomer at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. “One exciting discovery made with NASA’s Swift is that the brightness of SDSS1133 has changed little in optical or ultraviolet light for a decade, which is not something typically seen in a young supernova remnant.”
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 10:56:14 +0000

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