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NASA's Swift Satellite Detects Rare Eruption From Black Hole

NASA’s Swift satellite detected an rare outburst of x-ray energy from a star system around 8,000 light years away from Earth on June 15. Researchers believe the flare of x-ray energy from V404 Cygni was triggered by a buildup of gas in the accretion disk around the system’s black hole. A similar outburst was detected from the same blackhole, which is feeding on V404 Cygni’s binary star, in 1989.

This NASA visualisation shows the outburst of x-ray energy from the black hole’s accretion disk Credit: YouTube/NASA