Researchers capture best ever evidence of rare black hole

ESA's XMM-Newton observatory has discovered the best-ever candidate for a very rare and elusive type of cosmic phenomenon: a medium-weight black hole in the process of tearing apart and feasting on a nearby star.

There are various types of black hole lurking throughout the Universe: massive stars create stellar-mass black holes when they die, while galaxies host supermassive black holes at their centres, with masses equivalent to millions or billions of Suns.

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Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNH/D.Lin et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI

Data from NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope (yellow-white) and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple). The purple-white source in the lower left shows X-ray emission from the remains of a star that was ripped apart as it fell towards an intermediate mass black hole. The host galaxy of the black hole is located in the middle of the image.

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Credit: European Space Agency

The X-ray source 3XMM J215022.4−055108, viewed with ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory in 2006 (left) and 2009 (right). This is the best-ever candidate for a very rare and elusive type of cosmic phenomenon: a so-called intermediate-mass black hole in the process of tearing apart and feasting on a nearby star. This rare breed of black hole was spotted as it disrupted and tore apart a nearby star, gorging on the resulting debris and throwing off an enormous amount of light in the process. It has a mass of around fifty thousand times that of the Sun, and is located within a massive cluster of stars on the outskirts of a galaxy some 740 million light-years away. A comparison between these two images shows how the burst of energy released by this powerful event gradually decreased over the years.

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Scientists have discovered that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies may be growing faster than their host galaxies.

This challenges the long-held belief that black holes and their galaxies grow in lockstep.

Astronomers used very deep data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to make this discovery.

Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy snacking on gas and then "burping" — not once, but twice.

The dining galaxy is known by its abbreviated name, J1354, and is about 800 million light years from Earth. Scientists used observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the ground-based optical telescopes to track both the behavior and diet of this monster-sized black hole.

The Chandra data revealed a bright, point-like source of X-ray emission at the center of J1354, a telltale sign of the presence of a black hole containing millions or billions of times more mass than our sun.

The X-ray data also provide evidence that the supermassive black hole is embedded in a heavy veil of gas.

The researchers found evidence that in the past the supermassive black hole consumed large amounts of gas while blasting off an outflow of high-energy particles. Eventually, this outflow turned off, and then turned back on with another black hole snack about 100,000 later.