A black hole skulking in the shadows 600 million light-years away in space gave itself away with a dazzling flash, the light of a star it had just gnashed and eaten.
Using NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers found the cosmic object in an unexpected place. Rather than sitting dead center in its galaxy like most supermassive black holes, this one was thousands of light-years away from the core — 2,600, in fact.
What’s more, there is another enormous black hole that is the actual nucleus. While the catawampus black hole has the mass of 1 million suns, the one that defines the galactic center is 100 million times the mass of the sun.
The burst of radiation detected, known as a tidal disruption event or TDE, began when a star wandered too close to the black hole. If not for that stellar snack, the black hole would have escaped astronomers’ notice.
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