Researchers Detect A Mysterious Flash Of X-Rays From A Faraway Galaxy (nytimes.com)

"It was a spark in the night. A flash of X-rays from a galaxy hovering nearly invisibly on the edge of infinity. Astronomers say they do not know what caused it." Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the New York Times: The orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, was in the midst of a 75-day survey of a patch of sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South, when it recorded the burst from a formerly quiescent spot in the cosmos. For a few brief hours on Oct 1, 2014, the X-rays were a thousand times brighter than all the light from its home galaxy, a dwarf unremarkable speck almost 11 billion light years from here, in the constellation Fornax. Then whatever had gone bump in the night was over and the X-rays died.

The event as observed does not fit any known phenomena, according to Franz Bauer, an astronomer at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and lead author of a report to be published in Science.
He described some possible explanation in a blog post this week -- for example, a star being torn apart by a black hole, or the afterglow from a gamma ray burst seen sideways -- but the spectrum readings aren't a match, according to the Times. "None of the usual cosmic catastrophe suspects work."

Comments

Shepard!

[ravenshrike]

Clearly someone destroyed the Reapers.

ZOMG

[luna69]

Astronomical observations don't always need to be reported as "mysterious," tbh.

Re:ZOMG

[Anonymous Coward]

It is standard operating procedure to encourage continued funding. Trump has a lot of the propellorheads kind of nervous, so we expect to see higher volumes of these stories.

When did it happen?

[Stan92057]

What would be interesting is if they told us when the event happened. 11 billion light years away didn't happen last nite. How do we know that half the stars in the sky aren't already dead their last bit of light hasn't gotten here yet..