Huge explosion of X-Ray

Scientists have recently observed a huge explosion of X-ray light for the very first time from a white dwarf. The explosion came from the dead remains of a star in a superhot explosion.

“It was to some extent a fortunate coincidence, really”, explains Ole K?nig from the Astronomical Institute at FAU in the Dr. Karl Remeis observatory in Bamberg, who has published an article about this observation in the journal Nature, together with Prof. Dr. J?rn Wilms and a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the University of Tübingen, the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona und the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. "These X-ray flashes last only a few hours and are almost impossible to predict, but the observational instrument must be pointed directly at the explosion at exactly the right time," explains the astrophysicist.

The instruments used to observe the system is the eROSITA X-ray telescope, located at a distance of one and a half million light years from Earth and has been readily being used to survey the sky for soft X-Ray since 2019. On the 7th of July in the year 2020, the telescope measured a burst of strong X-Ray radiation in an area that had not given off any radiation in the sky 4 hours earlier. When the telescope surveyed the same part of sky 4 hours later, the radiation had completely disappeared implying that the X-Ray flash that have ignited the burst must have lasted less than 8 hours. These explosions have been theoretically predicted more than 20 years, but were never observed directly till now.