A strange bright object 90 million light-years away from Earth is currently perplexing astronomers.
Using the Swift telescope, an international team of researchers can't determine if this bright source of light is a supermassive black hole, made of merging black holes, or the remains of a massive star entering its supernova phase.
The object, known as SDSS1133, was recorded by astronomers for more than 60 years. It lies within the Markarian 177 galaxy, which sits in the cup of the big dipper. It's about 40 light-years across and its center suggests star formation, something triggered by a disturbance.
So what is it?
"With the data we have in hand, we can't yet distinguish between these two scenarios," says astronomer Michael Koss, from ETH Zurich. "One exciting discovery made with NASA's Swift is that the brightness of SDSS1133 has changed little in optical or ultraviolet light for a decade, which is not something typically seen in a young supernova remnant."
So that suggests that SDSS1133 is a black hole, right? If that's the case, it's a strange one, sitting over 2,000 light-years from it's galaxy's core. This could be due to a merger of two galaxies with black holes that disrupts both galaxies' shapes, as well as triggers star formation. If both galaxies had supermassive black holes, they become a binary pair of black holes before eventually merging completely.
This theory also explains why it's so far away from its host galaxy. When black holes merge, they release a lot of energy as gravitational radiation, giant ripples in space-time moving in all directions. If the black holes were different in size, which is likely, one of the black holes ripples are stronger than the other, leading to the a lopsided merger that ends up kicking the merged black hole out into space. This would mark the first time we have observed such a black hole merger.
However, astronomers believe that SDSS1133 might be something else: a rare star known as a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV). These are massive stars that have regular eruptions that send materials into space long before they explode into supernova.
If SDSS1133 is an LBV, then observations show that it erupted for a long time: from 1950 to 2001. This would make it the longest known such event ever observed.
Whichever scenario fits SDSS1133, it's still a never-before-seen kind of object that might fill us in on more of the mysteries of the Universe.
Researchers hope to get a better look at SDSS1133 in October, 2015 with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Photo Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey
