Scientists see powerful explosion from mysterious, unknown object in space

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. It could be the first X-ray burster found in that Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, a flare coming out of a mysterious magnetar – or something else entirely, researchers said. "Using a novel machine learning approach, we looked back through over 20 years of archived observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and discovered a remarkable, powerful X-ray flash from an unknown object outside our own galaxy that had gone unnoticed for years within the vast Chandra archive – a true needle in the haystack event." "It also demonstrates the value of using artificial intelligence for scientific discovery in archived astronomical data – there might be countless other discoveries waiting to be found in observations we've already made." The finding is reported in a new paper, ‘Representation learning for time-domain high-energy astrophysics: Discovery of extragalactic fast X-ray transient XRT 200515’, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.