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Black Holes
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Black Holes On December 3, 1995, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope identified a black hole in the galaxy NGC 4621, located 100 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo. This is the second super-massive black hole that astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found. Astronomers believe that the mass of this black hole is about 1.2 billion times the mass of our sun, but it is concentrated in a space that is not any bigger than our solar system There are two puzzling questions that astronomers are trying to answer. The black hole is fueled by the galaxy and its 800 light-year-wide spiral disk of dust. Before the discovery of this black hole, astronomers did not think that there was any dust in elliptical galaxies like NGC 4261. Currently they believe that the disk of dust is the remnant of a smaller galaxy that fell into the core of NGC 4261. The black hole will swallow up the gas from the smaller galaxy over the next 100 million years. Researchers believe that while the gas is being swallowed by the black hole, the process will produce some amazing fireworks. The second puzzling question that astronomers are trying to answer is why isn’t the black hole at the center of the galaxy? According to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the black hole is 20 light-years from the center of the galaxy, but since the black hole is so massive it is hard to explain how ...
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