Astronomers have caught a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. This flare-up was captured in a new movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The black hole and its companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth. The black hole in MAXI J1820+070 has a mass about eight times that of the sun, identifying it as a so-called stellar-mass black hole, formed by the destruction of a massive star. (This is in contrast to supermassive black holes that contain millions or billions of times the sun’s mass.)
The companion star orbiting the black hole has about half the mass of the sun...
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