Astronomers have been studying black holes for decades and are able to "see" them due to the fact that gas gets extremely hot and emits X-rays before it is swallowed completely and is lost forever.
The new research found that X-rays are being emitted as a regular signal from the super-massive black hole. The frequency of the pulse is related to the size of the black hole.
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This Hubble Space Telescope image, taken December 29, 2005 and released on October 2, 2007 shows giant star-forming nebula with massive young stellar clusters. Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of radio waves said that they had never seen anything like it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or dying black holes.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
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"Such signals are a well known feature of smaller black holes in our Galaxy when gas is pulled from a companion star," said lead researcher Marek Gierlinski. "The really interesting thing is that we have now established a link between these light-weight black holes and those millions of times as heavy as our Sun."
Scientists hope future research will tell why some super-massive black holes show this behavior while others do not.
(Xinhua News Agency September 19, 2008)