Black Hole’s Behavior Defies the Rules of Astrophysics

Black Hole Basics

Astronomers believe black holes — those reality-warping, light-sucking singular forces of nature — come in three basic varieties. You’ve got your stellar mass black holes, about as massive as our sun; you’ve got intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), some 100 to 1,000 times the sun’s mass; and you’ve got the immodestly named supermassive black holes, up to billions of times the sun’s mass. So basically, small, medium, and large.

Astronomers have a number of ways to tell the different kinds of black holes apart. Larger black holes, for instance, give off low-energy X-rays, and smaller black holes produce high-energy X-rays. (To be clear, it’s not the black hole itself that’s emitting this light, but the rapidly accelerating mass of swirling stuff around it about to get “devoured” by the black hole.)

Imagine astronomers’ surprise, then, when a Nature paper came out indicating that a particular star system — with all the hallmarks of an IMBH, including low-energy X-rays, and ultra-bright illumination — is actually a tiny stellar mass black hole.

Read the entire article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2013/11/27/black-holes-behavior-defies-the-rules-of-astrophysics/