In
February 2016, Japan launched a pioneering black-hole-monitoring satellite but
after the successful launch they lost its control under strange circumstances.
Now, we can finally witness what Hitomi saw right before it went offline. When
Hitomi went offline, researchers were succesful in gathering some data from
Hitomi, which was published in a new research paper in Nature, which displays
Hitomi’s last observation. It has some interesting implications for what we
currently know about the role of black holes in galaxy formation.
Hitomi’s
last observations were of the Perseus Cluster, a massive galaxy cluster 240
million light years containing a supermassive black hole at its center. Hitomi
was able to capture this amazing view of the galaxy (shown above), as well as
to extent its x-ray activity. Scientists were expecting to observe teeming
activity in the center of the cluster, but Hitomi’s last x-ray observations
displayed very little action.
Learn
more here.