Students and researchers from MIT and Harvard have spotted a black hole 30,000 light-years away.
The team, which built the Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, last year detected a newly flaring black hole in the constellation Columba.
REXIS, a shoebox-sized instrument, was designed to measure the X-rays that near-Earth asteroid Bennu emits in response to incoming solar radiation.
In November, while performing detailed science observations of Bennu, REXIS captured X-rays radiating from a point off the asteroid’s edge.
“Our initial checks showed no previously cataloged object in that position in space,” Branden Allen, a Harvard research scientist and student supervisor who discovered the source among REXIS data, said in a statement.
The glowing object turned out to be a newly flaring black hole X-ray binary—discovered just a week earlier by Japan’s MAXI telescope and then confirmed by NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).
REXIS, meanwhile, detected the same activity millions of miles from Earth while orbiting Bennu: the first such outburst ever perceived from interplanetary space.
“Detecting this X-ray burst is a proud moment for the REXIS team,” according to Madeline Lambert, an MIT graduate student who designed the instrument’s command sequences that revealed the black hole.
These X-ray emissions—only observed from space—occur when a black hole pulls in matter from a normal star in orbit around it.
“We set out to train students how to build and operate space instruments,” MIT professor Richard Binzel, instrument scientist for the REXIS experiment, said. “It turns out, the greatest lesson is to always be open to discovering the unexpected.”
Nearly 100 undergraduate and graduate students have worked on the REXIS team since the mission’s inception.
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