When stars like our Sun use up all their fuel, they shrink to form white dwarfs. Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in a super hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation.
A research team has now been able to observe such an explosion of X-ray light for the very first time.
“It was to some extent a fortunate coincidence, really,” explains Ole König from the Astronomical Institute at FAU. “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 instrument in this case is the eROSITA X-ray telescope, which is currently located one and a half million kilometers from Earth and has been surveying the sky for soft X-rays since 2019.
On July 7, 2020 it measured strong X-ray radiation in an area of the sky that had been completely inconspicuous four hours previously. When the X-ray telescope surveyed the same position in the sky four hours later, the radiation had disappeared. It follows that the X-ray flash that had previously completely overexposed the center of the detector must have lasted less than eight hours.
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