NASA Chandra announcement?

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Originally Posted by troypiggo

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...-rays-bubbles/

Thanks Troy.

I hadn't heard about this phenomenon.

[CraigS]

Actually, the big mystery here arises from the observation that the decline in the Supernova optical and radio luminosity, has not been accompanied by a decline in the X-Ray band emissions. The X-Ray emissions have been steady over a period of 12 years (since 1995) which was not expected from a Supernova of this size.

The current Supernova-turning-into-a-magnetar model predicts a decline in X-Rays over a similar period.

They've matched up the observed decline of X-Rays with a model which uses accreting material surrounding a black hole.

They still aren't entirely convinced as they're recommending deeper Chandra or XMM-Newton observations. They'll be looking for short term variations in the X-ray light curve, which could be seen as evidence for ongoing accretion (& hence more weight to the 'Black Hole' theory).

I'm not so sure this announcement was as exciting as we were hoping for.

A definitive "We've finally seen a Black Hole" would've been a much cooler announcement .. oh well … that's astronomy, huh ?

Cheers

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by troypiggo

I'm confused. What was the big announcement originally mentioned? Was it JJJ's space.com link above, or was it those 2 huge structures above and below our Milky Way?

These 'structures' are a sort of by-product of their quest to produce a Gamma Ray map of the observable universe.

Behind all this is the search for yet another postulated mysterious substance called "self interacting dark matter" which was, itself, invented to explain a signal picked up by the DAMA dark matter experiment facility in Italy ('96 to 2002).

Cheers