DEYR: High-energy X-rays coming from the center of our Milky Way galaxy home may be the “screams” of dead stars feeding on companion stars in a vast cosmic graveyard, astronomers say.
NASA’s NuSTAR space telescope has detected X-rays emanating from an area about 100 light years from the massive central black hole lurking in the heart of our galaxy, a hole that is 4.3 million times the mass of our sun, they said.
“We can see a completely new component of the center of our galaxy with NuSTAR’s images,” says Kerstin Perez from Columbia University in New York. “We can’t definitively explain the X-ray signal yet – it’s a mystery. More work needs to be done.” NASA’s NuSTAR telescope, or Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, captures clear images of the center of the Milky Way in high-energy X-rays since its launch in 2012.
One leading candidate for the X-rays is dead or dying stars, which can sometimes be paired in a binary system with another star from which they siphon off matter in a zombie-like frenzy of feeding that can result in eruptions of X-rays.
A particular kind of stellar “zombie” known as a pulsar might also be involved, researchers say.
Pulsars are formed when stars that have exploded in a supernova then collapse in on themselves, spinning extremely fast while sending out intense, narrow beams of X-ray radiation.
