CAMBIRDGE, Mass., Nov. 15 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers say they've have found evidence of the youngest black hole in our cosmic neighborhood, providing a chance to watch one develop from infancy.
The 30-year-old object is a remnant of a supernova in a galaxy approximately 50 million light years from Earth, and could help scientists understand how stars explode, which ones leave behind black holes or neutron stars, and the number of black holes in our galaxy and elsewhere, a NASA release said Monday.
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a number of other satellites revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007 suggesting a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or from a binary companion.
Scientists think the black hole, first discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979, formed when a star about 20 times more massive than the sun collapsed.
"If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed," Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., says.
Although evidence strongly points to this object being a black hole, another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission.
This would make the object the youngest and brightest example of such a "pulsar wind nebula" and the youngest known neutron star, scientists say.
