Space oddity: Scientists find a nearby black hole 'burping' out gas after

The first double-black-hole galaxy was found by accident in 2003, according to Comerford.

According to study co-author Marie Machacek from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the feedback loop observed helps keep galaxies from growing too large. Black holes aren't very discerning eaters: They consume anything that comes past the point of no return known as the event horizon. To date, black holes as "medium" as 50,000 times more massive than our sun have been spotted.

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory showed that one black hole contains the anticipated number of stars, while the other is significantly lighter. "This black hole is blasting hot gas and particles into its surroundings that must play an important role in the evolution of the galaxy", said team member Dr Eric Schlegel, of the University of Texas in San Antonio.

This was observed in the Messier 51 galaxy system, which is 26 million light-years from Earth (pretty close, by galactic standards).

These blasts of matter that black holes expel, which scientists believe help regulate the size of the holes and create new stars, can be hard to catch. Normally, galaxies have a single supermassive black hole at the center, equivalent to 1 million to 1 billion times the mass of our sun.

A slender region of hydrogen gas emission was found just beyond the outer arc. This suggests that the hotter, X-ray emitting gas has 'snow-plowed, ' or swept up, the hydrogen gas from the center of the galaxy. Astronomers refer to this region of emissions as "feedback" which impacts a black hole's "host galaxy", in this case NGC 5195.

In NGC 5195, the properties of the gas around the X-ray-glowing arcs suggest that the outer arc has plowed up enough material to trigger the formation of new stars. "But at the same time, it can be responsible for how some stars form", she added.

The black hole sits in the centre of a small spiral galaxy that's working on merging with a second, larger spiral galaxy. The energy generated by this infalling matter would produce the outbursts. The team calculated approximately that it took about one to three million years for the inner arc to arrive at its existing position, and three to six million years for the outer arc.

The arcs are also significant due to their location in the galaxy. Some scientists have even theorized that black holes are a link to other universe.

Astronomers have been on the lookout for "intermediate mass" black holes (IMBHs) to fill this gap, and knowing the preponderance of stellar mass and supermassive black holes, there should be a lot of IMBHs out there - basically medium-sized black holes on their way to becoming supermassive. Schlegel is the lead author of a new study on these cosmic belches, which was presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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