NASA Confirms That Cosmic Object Is so Bright That It Defies Laws of Physics

If you’re looking for some of the brightest objects in the cosmos, squint no further than ultra-luminous x-ray sources, or ULXs.

These loci of overwhelming luminosity have long puzzled astronomers because they at least appear to exceed what’s known as the Eddington limit, which restricts how bright an object can be based on its mass, by up to 500 times.

Many scientists, though, simply chalked this up to an optical illusion. But now, in a first-of-its-kind study published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers used NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telephone Array (NuSTAR) to observe a ULX…