Astronomers reveal a new type of celestial object that has been hiding in plain sight for decades

These strange celestial objects have been hiding in plain sight for decades

It’s unclear what these objects actually are, but evidence for them has been detected by NASA’s Chandra space telescope for years

In a galaxy far, far away, strange objects beam radiation out into space. For years, these weird bodies have been hiding in plain sight—but now new observations reveal they may be key to understanding the lives and deaths of galaxies.

For decades, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has been picking up the signal of these objects, but scientists had largely ignored the data. The radiation the objects emit is relatively low-energy compared with that of most stars, making it easy to dismiss as noise.

“[Scientists] didn’t even know the objects were there,” says Jimmy Irwin, a professor at the University of Alabama and a co-author of a new paper published in Nature Astronomy that describes the odd objects. “They ignored the very, very lowest-energy channels because they thought they were unimportant.”

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Irwin and his colleagues, Ph.D. candidate Mustafa Muhibullah and Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian lecturer Rosanne Di Stefano, didn’t anticipate that they would find anything of note when they decided to go through the overlooked data just in case. Irwin compares the process to diving for treasure: you might find a long-lost gem, but you are far more likely to find a bunch of garbage.

The three scoured data collected by the Chandra space telescope between 1999 and 2017 and painstakingly filtered out any random artifacts and other junk. They were left with the signatures of emissions of low-energy x-rays coming from what they call “hypersoft x-ray sources,” a new type of celestial object.