NASA's sophisticated telescope Chandra has discovered an unusual cosmic phenomenon which has never been seen before.
Astronomer Jimmy Irwin and his team at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosaan has announced that Chandra has caught unidentified X-ray emitting objects that light up and then go dim in an hour.
According to New Scientist, Irwin's team originally planned to search through data from the Observatory to find star-sized black holes in groups of old stars around other galaxies when they stumbled upon two mysterious objects that emit X-ray lights greater than binary systems where stars only emit by a factor of five to 10 in around an hour.
"But we found these extreme objects that varied by factors of 100 to 200," says Irwin. "So it was a bit of an accident that we found the flares, as we were not originally looking for something so spectacular."
ZME Science notes that the first object was found near NGC 4636, roughly 47 million light-years away from us, and flared in February of 2003, while the other, is found near galaxy NGC 5128, 14 million light-years from Earth and flared five times between 2007 and 2014.
In a statement, Peter Maksym, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the flaring behavior of the unidentified objects don't resemble anything we have known, leaving astronomers quite puzzled.
"These flares are extraordinary. For a brief period, one of the sources became one of the brightest ULX to ever be seen in an elliptical galaxy."
Meanwhile, astronomers said there could be two possible explanations for the detected stars. One, it might demonstrate the case where matter is being pulled away from a companion star and falls rapidly onto a black hole or neutron star, or a matter falling onto an intermediate-mass black hole.
The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature.