Massive black hole found during study of archival data
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029071
Scientific Computing : A black hole 100 million solar masses in size has been spotted in the process of devouring a star. While examining spectra of objects taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey , Andrea Merloni of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues found an unusual change between 1998 and 2005 in the spectrum of one galaxy located some 3.5 billion light-years away. Further confirmation of the high-energy emission came when the team discovered that both the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which had taken pictures of the region at about the same time, had also seen the massive flare. An analysis of the data from the three archival sources confirmed that the flare fit the model of a star being pulled into a massive black hole.
