NASA announced that it has found a strange object 10 million times brighter than the Sun, which defies physics. If a candy falls on the surface of this neutron star, it will hit it with energy equal to a thousand hydrogen bombs.
A strange “ultraluminous X-ray source”, millions of times more luminous than the Sun, is breaking the Eddington limit in physics, a new study has revealed.
Astronomers call these outliers very luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), and they emit roughly 10 million times more energy than the Sun. This amount of energy violates a famous law of physics called Eddington’s limit; This law determines how bright something of a given size can be. Scientists expect that if something goes beyond the Eddington limit, it will explode and break into pieces. However, according to a NASA statement, ULXs “regularly exceed this limit by 100 to 500 times and have baffled scientists.”
New observations published in The Astrophysical Journal from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), which sees the universe in high-energy X-ray beams, confirmed that there is definitely one particular ULX called M82 X-2 that is very bright. Previous theories have suggested that extreme brightness could be a type of vision error, but this new object shows that this is not the case and that this ULX actually somehow breaks the Eddington limit.
Astronomers believe that ULXs can be black holes, but M82 X-2 is a mass known as a “neutron star.” Neutron stars are the leftover, dead cores of stars like the Sun. A neutron star is so dense that the gravity on its surface is approximately 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s. This strong attraction means that any material attracted to the surface of this dead star will have an explosive effect.
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