Rostom Mbarek

Two neutron stars (the remnants of dead stars, compressed to the size of a city but weighing as much as the Sun) spiral around each other and eventually collide. At that moment, something between a black hole and a super-powered magnet is born: a field billions of times stronger than that of the most powerful MRI machine.

For years, silence reigned in the heart of galaxy 1ES 1927+654: the accreting gas merely whispered in X-rays, leaking slow winds. But in 2022–2025, the picture changed dramatically. Spectra taken by XMM-Newton and Swift lit up with emission lines — a narrow peak at 0.56 keV, likely from OVII oxygen, a broader feature near 1 keV, and a powerful iron band in the 6–7 keV region.