Nasa Itsy Bitsy Black Hole Is Just Three Times The Mass Of The Sun

It seems NASA has discovered another record-sized black hole.The U.S. space agency announced Friday that it may have discovered a record-sized black hole, smaller than any previously discovered.Officials said Friday that they have detected the "heartbeat" of one of the smallest black holes on record. The black hole, if it exists, would weigh less than three times the mass of the sun, placing it near the theoretical minimum mass required for black holes.The NASA team used the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite to identify a candidate for the smallest-known black hole, saying the latest calculations may place the black hole's mass below the minimum necessary to sustain a cosmic giant. "We think that most of these patterns represent cycles of accumulation and ejection in an unstable disk, and we now see seven of them in IGR J17091," said Tomaso Belloni at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy. "Identifying these signatures in a second black hole system is very exciting."The space agency said the record-sized black hole is named IGR J17091-3624 after the astronomical coordinates of its sky position.

To discover the black hole, the team employed the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite. Launched in late 1995, RXTE is second only to Hubble as the longest serving of NASA's operating astrophysics missions. RXTE provides a unique observing window into the extreme environments of neutron stars and black holes.This entire process happens in as little as 40 seconds. Researchers say that this system's heartbeat emission can be 20 times fainter than GRS 1915, the smallest black hole on record, and can cycle some eight times faster, in as little as five seconds. The NASA team also announced that the strong magnetic fields near the black hole's event horizon eject some of the gas into dual, oppositely directed jets that blast outward at about 98 percent the speed of light.The record holder for the smallest black hole is another black hole binary named GRS 1915+105. This system is unique in displaying more than a dozen highly structured patterns, typically lasting between seconds and hours.Astronomers first became aware of the binary system during an outburst in 2003. Archival data from various space missions show it becomes active every few years. Its most recent outburst started in February and is ongoing. The system is located in the direction of the constellation Scorpius, but its distance is not well established. It could be as close as 16,000 light-years or more than 65,000 light-years away.The potential discovery comes as NASA announced earlier this month the discovery of one of the largest black holes on record. Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

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