We didn't yet have the technology to notice, but Sagittarius A*,
the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, threw
one hell of a tantrum a few hundred years ago. It's the only
explanation for mysterious x-ray anomalies. The center of the
Milky Way is full of X-ray sources, many of which seem to
originate from clouds that could not possible produce them.
Astronomers figure that what we're really look at here are the
aftershocks of a more severe event that occurred at some earlier
point, before we had telescopes capable of noticing this
original flare. Previous analysis of these X-ray emissions
suggest that they indeed do have an earlier origin, but until
now we couldn't know for sure what that was. There are two main
possibilities. If the original flare was only slightly stronger
than the X-ray flares we now observe, then the initial event
could have come from any ordinary binary star system,
specifically one with a normal star and either a white dwarf or
neutron star. Above a certain energy level