New News, Jakarta – A new study from NASA shows a strange object called an ‘ultraluminous X-ray source’ or ULX glows millions of times brighter than the Sun and violates a law of physics known as the Eddington limit.
This object is called a violator of the laws of physics because it emits about 10 million times more energy than the sun. The Eddington limit limits how bright an object of a certain size can become. If the object exceeds the Eddington limit, scientists predict that the object will explode into pieces. However, ULXs “regularly exceed this limit by 100 to 500 times, leaving scientists baffled,” according to a NASA statement. Live Science.
New observations from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) published in The Astrophysical Journal confirm that a certain ULX, called M82 X-2, is definitely too bright. Previous theories suggested that the extreme brightness could act as some sort of optical illusion, but new research shows that’s not the case – this ULX literally breaks Eddington’s boundaries.
Scientists used to think that ULXs could be black holes, but M82 X-2 is the object known as a neutron star. Neutron stars are the dead core of stars like the Sun. Neutron stars are so dense that the gravity on their surface is about 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s. This intense gravity means that any matter pulled onto the surface of the neutron star will have an explosive effect.
The new study finds that M82 X-2 consumes about 1.5 times Earth’s mass each year, by absorbing material from its neighboring stars. When this amount of matter hits the surface of a neutron star, it is enough to produce the intense brightness observed by astronomers.
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The research team thinks that this is evidence that something happened to the M82 X-2 that allowed it to breach the Eddington limit. Their current idea is that the powerful magnetic field of a neutron star changes the shape of its atoms, allowing the star to stay afloat even as it gets brighter.
“These observations allow us to see the effects of very strong magnetic fields that we cannot reproduce on Earth with current technology,” said lead study author Matteo Bachetti, an astrophysicist at the Cagliari Astronomical Observatory in Italy. “This is the beauty of astronomy… we can’t set up experiments to get quick answers; we have to wait for the universe to show us its secrets.”
