NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has spent the majority of its life studying the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. It was tasked with traveling to the asteroid, orbiting it, and eventually snatching samples so it could return that material to Earth. Spotting distant black holes wasn’t initially part of the plan, but as NASA explains in a new blog post, the probe’s observations of Bennu were hiding a secret that was uncovered by university students who were scouring the data.
The REXIS instrument installed on OSIRIS-REx detected the distant black hole during an observation attempt long before it arrived at the asteroid. It spotted x-rays being emitted from a previously undiscovered object some 30,000 light-years away. After additional study, that newfound object is now believed to be a black hole.
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Students stumble upon new black hole in NASA asteroid probe data originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 3 Mar 2020 at 21:08:26 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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