Two new studies provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March.
NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.
"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument.
"It behaves unlike anything we've seen before," he stated,
The galaxy is so far away that it took the light from the event approximately
3.9 billion years to reach Earth.
The second study was led by Ashley Zauderer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
It examines the unprecedented outburst through observations from numerous ground-based radio observatories, including the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory's Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) near Socorro, N. M.
According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
