Data from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Digital Sky Survey has played an important supporting role in helping radio and X-ray astronomers discover an ancient black hole speeding through the Sun's galactic neighborhood. The rogue black hole is devouring a small companion star as the pair travels in an eccentric orbit looping to the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy.
It is believed that the black hole is the remnant of a massive star that lived out its brief life billions of years ago and later was gravitationally kicked from its home star cluster to wander the Galaxy with its companion.
The discovery was made with observations from the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope and the Rossi X-ray satellite.
An artist's illustration and additional information for this release are available on the Web at these URLs:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2001/29
http://hubble.stsci.edu/go/news
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html
http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/pr/highvblackhole/
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
[Contact: Dr. Felix Mirabel, Dr. Vivek Dhawan, Dave Finley, Ray Villard ]
13-Sep-2001
