Nov 15, 2010 20:01 GMT  ·  By

NASA organized today a news conference and revealed information that concerns the entire humankind: a 30-year-old black hole has been discovered 50 million light years from Earth, by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

This is the youngest black hole that exists in our cosmic neighborhood that astronomers know of.

The ‘baby’ black hole is what remains of the SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100, nearly 50 million light years from Earth.

NASA's Chandra and the Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory, all found a powerful source of X-rays that has not changed between 1995 and 2007, which means that the faraway object is a black hole that feeds either on material falling into it from the supernova, or on a binary companion.

Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts and leader of the study say that “if our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed.”

The researchers believe that SN 1979C, which was first spotted by an amateur astronomer back in 1979, formed when a star almost 20 times more massive than the sun collapsed.

In the past, there have been many new black holes in the distant universe that have been discovered in the form of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), but SN 1979C is different for two reasons: it is much closer than any previously discovered black hole, and it belongs to a class of supernovas that are not linked to a GRB.

Theoretically, the majority of black holes form when the core of a star collapses, and a GRB is not produced.

This 30-year-old black hole represents an amazing opportunity for scientists to watch how this kind of object develops.

It could help astronomers understand the way that massive stars explode, which ones leave behind them neutron stars or black holes, how many black holes could there be in our galaxy and so on.

Co-author Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says that “this may be the first time the common way of making a black hole has been observed.

“However, it is very difficult to detect this type of black hole birth because decades of X-ray observations are needed to make the case.”

There might be some skepticals about the idea of a black hole of an observed age of only 30 years, but it actually fits the current theories: in 2005, there was a theory that stated that the light coming from this supernova was fueled by a jet coming from a black hole, that couldn’t pass through the hydrogen envelope of the star to form a GRB – the SN 1979C fits.

Scientists admitted that even if evidence says that in SN 1979C there is a newly formed black hole, there is a chance that a young and very fast-spinning neutron star, with an extremely strong wind of high energy particles, could be responsible for the emission of X-rays.

If this theory proves to be correct, than this means that the object in SN 1979C is the youngest and brightest ‘pulsar wind nebula’ and also the youngest known neutron star (the Crab pulsar is about 950 years old).

Jon Morse, head of the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that “it's very rewarding to see how the commitment of some of the most advanced telescopes in space, like Chandra, can help complete the story.”

The results will be published in the New Astronomy journal in a paper co-written by Patnaude, Loeb, and Christine Jones of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.