Quote:Astronomers at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory spotted what could be a wandering black hole, kicked out of the center of its parent galaxy when a small galaxy collided with a larger one. In their study, they gave it the charming name XJ1417+52.

In the image above, we see the wide-field view from the Hubble Space Telescope. The left inset shows a close-up view of the larger galaxy, which gobbled up the smaller galaxy, XJ’s own Alderaan. On the right is Chandra’s X-ray image of XJ, in purple.

These kinds of black holes are found at the core of large galaxies, and supermassive black holes are kind of all over the place, but what makes this one unique is its insane size and luminosity: It has a mass of 100,000 times that of the Sun, and is ten times more luminous than the brightest X-ray source ever seen.

It reached peak brightness in 2000 and 2002 when, astronomers theorize, a star got a little too close to XJ and was torn apart by tidal forces.

(10-09-2016, 11:12 AM)Customer Wrote: Pretty cool to know that we can't see it, but it's there.