NASA Shocker! They Admit "a Cataclysmic Event Has Occurred in Space but We Have No Idea What"

NASA has reported a cataclysmic event is taking place in space, but experts are still investigating what exactly has happened.

Mystery X-ray flashes beamed towards Earth before vanishing just 24 hours later, leaving scientists to investigate the source.

Here’s the video if you don’t wanna read the article:

The phenomenon, which stemmed from a galaxy 10.7 billion light years away, was captured by NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Initial findings suggest it came from a “completely new type of cataclysmic event”.

A NASA spokesman said: “A mysterious flash of X-rays has been discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in the deepest X-ray image ever obtained. 

“This source likely comes from some sort of destructive event in space, but may be of a variety that scientists have never seen before.”

Report co-author Kevin Schawinski, of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, said: “We may have observed a completely new type of cataclysmic event.

“Whatever it is, a lot more observations are needed to work out what we’re seeing.”

Franz Bauer of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago said: “Ever since discovering this source, we’ve been struggling to understand its origin.

“It’s like we have a jigsaw puzzle but we don’t have all of the pieces.”

The X-ray source, located in a region of the sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), has remarkable properties. 

Prior to October 2014, this source was not detected in X-rays, but then it erupted and became at least a factor of 1,000 brighter in a few hours. 

After about a day, the source had faded completely below the sensitivity of Chandra.

Thousands of hours of legacy data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes helped determine that the event likely came from a faint, small galaxy about 10.7 billion lightyears from Earth. 

For a few minutes, the X-ray source produced a thousand times more energy than all the stars in this galaxy.

If the jet is pointing towards the Earth, a burst of gamma rays is detected. 

As the jet expands, it loses energy and produces weaker, more isotropic radiation at X-ray and other wavelengths.

Possible explanations for the CDF-S X-ray source, according to the researchers, are a GRB that is not pointed toward Earth, or a GRB that lies beyond the small galaxy. 

A third possibility is that a medium-sized black hole swallowed a white dwarf star.

Co-author Ezequiel Treister, also of the Pontifical Catholic University, said: “None of these ideas fits the data perfectly.

“But then again, we’ve rarely if ever seen any of the proposed possibilities in actual data, so we don’t understand them well at all.”

The mysterious X-ray source was not seen at any other time during the two and a half months of exposure time Chandra has observed the CDF-S region, which has been spread out over the past 17 years. 

Moreover, no similar events have yet to be found in Chandra observations of other parts of the sky.

If the X-ray source was caused by a GRB triggered by the merger of a neutron star with a black hole or another neutron star, then gravitational waves would also have been produced. 

If such an event were to occur much closer to Earth, within a few hundred million light years, it may be detectable with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

A paper describing this result appears in the June 2017 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.

This original story appeared here:  http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/786414/NASA-CATACLYSMIC-space-event-no-explanation-Black-Hole