(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers from South Korea and China have detected an unusual mid-infrared flare in the galaxy NGC 3786 with NASA‘s WISE infrared space telescope. The discovery is reported in a preprint published on the arXiv website.
The spiral galaxy that came into the field of view of specialists is located in the constellation Ursa Major and has a redshift of about 0.009. The apparent size of the object is 2.1 by 1.1 arc minutes.
While exploring NGC 3786, astronomers noticed an infrared-only flare that occurred around mid-2020. Its amplitude turned out to be six to eight times greater than it should have been.
However, no significant increase in brightness was observed in the 2019-2021 optical monitoring data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). According to scientists, this phenomenon could be caused by a tidal disruption event (TDE).
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