The astronomers utilizing the ESA and NASA operated Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a mysterious think disk of debris whirling furiously around a very big black hole.
The massive black hole is located in the center of a spiral galaxy called NGC 3147 that is located at a distance of around 130mn light years from our Earth.
The thing which is puzzling the astronomers is that the disk should not be present there, as per the present astronomical theories. The active galaxies which feed on massive black holes located at their hearts produce a disk of debris often which surrounds a black hole. When the debris comes too close, it gets swallowed. However, in the galaxies which are less active, the black holes located at their centers do not have that much of gravitational force to draw the debris continuously from the galaxy around them.
It is believed that the NGC 3147 is one such of these galaxies and the astronomers assume that its massive black hole was actually starving for the debris before they found the disk speeding across the core at more than 10% light speed. This is the sort of thing which astronomers would most likely expect to discover encircling a black hole that is feeding on the material at the center of a very active galaxy.
The team further plans on researching similar galaxies in order to find out if this new observation is just a random anomaly or a representative of some trend.