NASA detects mysterious blobs of blue and green emitting from a distant galaxy (is a Black Hole having its lunch…)

“It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.”

H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space and others

DEEP SPACE researchers have detected a strange source emptying blue and green blobs form a distant galaxy.

This has completely baffled the astronomers studying it as all theories as to a cause of these colours from out of space has led to unsatisfactory answers.

One theory is that it could be the result of Black hole eating another object.

Hannah Earnshaw said: “This result is a step towards understanding some of the rarer and more extreme cases in which matter accretes onto black holes or neutron stars

NASA detected the flickering luminous objects using their Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The X-ray Observatory is used to detect supernovae and neutron stars and other X-ray signals from deep space sources.

However, the particular bulbous illuminations in green and blue coming from the distant galaxy, called the Fireworks galaxy (NGC 6946), have been flickering and changing rapidly in luminosity so that researchers conclude that they could not be supernovae or a neutron star.

Speaking about the short flickering behaviour of the lights, Hannah Earnshaw, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, said in a statement: “Ten days is a really short amount of time for such a bright object to appear.”

“Usually with NuSTAR, we observe more gradual changes over time and we don’t often observe a source multiple times in quick succession.

“In this instance, we were fortunate to catch a source changing extremely quickly, which is very exciting.”

And, NASA explained: “If an object gets too close to a black hole, gravity can pull that object apart, bringing the debris into a close orbit around the black hole.

“Material at the inner edge of this newly formed disk starts moving so fast that it heats up to millions of degrees and radiates X-rays.”

The lights are still a mystery and one commentator spoke that they reminded him of ‘The Colour out of Space’ a dark tale by the American Author H P Lovecraft.

NASA has recorded a visible-light image of the Fireworks galaxy (NGC 6946).

It comes from their Digital Sky Survey project.

The visible light image is layered with data from NASA’s NuSTAR observatory (in blue and green).

The phenomenon was detected by a combined effort by the NuSTAR X-ray observatory and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory.

The gravitational forces within a Black hole are so strong that even light cannot escape them.