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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

Surprise! Students get an unexpected glimpse of a black hole 30,000 light-years away:

Peering into deep space with an instrument they built, a group of students and researchers caught a surprising glimpse of a newly discovered black hole 30,000 light-years from Earth.

In the fall of 2019, students and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University were working with an instrument that they designed and now operate, the Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS), which is on board NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. While using the shoebox-size instrument to observe the asteroid Bennu, the spacecraft's destination, the team made an unexpected detection: a new black hole in the constellation Columba.

REXIS measures X-rays that are emitted from objects like Bennu in response to solar radiation. On Nov. 11, 2019, the collaborative group of researchers and students spotted X-rays radiating from a point off the edge of Bennu.

[...] Upon further analysis, the team found that the X-rays seen off the edge of Bennu were coming from a newly flaring black hole X-ray binary. The black hole, known as MAXI J0637-430, was discovered just a week before these observations by researchers using Japan's MAXI telescope, which operates from aboard the International Space Station. The X-rays were also detected by NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope, which is also on the space station. Although both telescopes were able to detect the X-rays from low Earth orbit, REXIS detected the event while millions of miles from Earth. This observation marks the first time that such an outburst has been detected from interplanetary space, according to the statement.

Original Submission