Tech Times : Astronomers mining a quarter-century of publicly available NASA data found 84 objects that every major X-ray catalog in existence had missed — not because the data was inadequate, but because the standard analysis pipeline never looked below the energy threshold where these objects live. The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy on September 9, 2026, describes a previously unrecognized class of cosmic objects called hypersoft X-ray sources (HSSs) — and suggests they may simultaneously help resolve two of the most stubborn open problems in modern astrophysics: why there are not enough candidate progenitors for Type Ia supernovae, the explosions that undergird the evidence for dark energy, and why distant galaxies show signs of helium ionization that no known source population can fully account for.
« These clandestine X-ray sources are actually among the most energetic objects in galaxies, and they could be solving two cosmic mysteries at once, » said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama, who led the study. The NASA Chandra press release confirms all three author quotes and the paper’s core findings.
Chandra découvre 84 objets cosmiques inconnus!
