Astronomers discover black hole devouring a star
Astronomers just caught a rare type of black hole—called an intermediate-mass black hole—in the act of swallowing a star, way out in a galaxy 450 million light-years from Earth.
These black holes are tough to find and don't quite fit into what we thought we knew about how black holes grow and evolve.
Findings suggest this discovery could help connect the dots
The team used X-ray data from HLX-1, a known black hole whose brightness shot up 100 times by 2012 and then dimmed again by 2023.
That strange glow tipped off Yi-Chi Chang and his crew at National Tsing Hua University that something unusual was happening.
Their findings, now published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest this discovery could help connect the dots between small and supermassive black holes—and maybe rewrite some cosmic textbooks along the way.