Cracking the Mystery of Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources with NASA Study

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) produce about 10 million times more energy than the sun, exceeding the Eddington limit, which puts a cap on how bright an object can be based on its mass. A recent study using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) confirms that ULXs break the Eddington limit, and suggests that strong magnetic fields may be responsible for this limit-breaking brightness. The study targeted a ULX called M82 X-2, which is stealing about 9 billion trillion tons of material per year from a neighboring star, and confirmed that it exceeds the Eddington limit.