Black Hole Unleashes Supermassive Belch

[Craig]

http://news.discovery.com/space/black-hole-unleashes-supermassive-belch-130108.html

 

While innocently surveying the Cosmos, astronomers serendipitously stumbled across a particularly uncouth galaxy. NGC 660 unleashed an epic belch, an event that we could see 44 million light-years distant.

 

This event emanated from the galaxy's core, around the likely location of a supermassive black hole.

To determine that the event was in fact triggered by NGC 660's central supermassive black hole and not a supernova, astronomers used the High Sensitivity Array (HSA) -- a global network of radio telescopes including the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Arecibo Telescope, the National Science Foundation's 100-meter Green Bank Telescope, and the 100-meter Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany. They found five bright spots of radio emissions near the galaxy's core and not an expanding ring of material that would be synonymous with an exploding star.