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On November 11, 2019, students
and researchers working on

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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission made
an unexpected observation – the

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detection of a black hole 30,000
light years away. The detection

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was made by an instrument about
the size of a shoebox. This is

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REXIS, the Regolith X-Ray
Imaging Spectrometer. It was

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proposed and built by teams at
MIT and Harvard and was

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originally designed to determine
the abundance of elements on the

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surface of asteroid Bennu. REXIS
contains a mask with a known

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pattern of open and closed
holes. As X-rays pass through

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these holes the mask’s shadow
shifts as it hits the

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sensor. Based on this shifting,
scientists can determine where

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the X-ray signals came from.
While OSIRIS-REx was observing

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the asteroid several million
miles from Earth, it detected

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X-rays radiating from a point
off the asteroid’s edge – at a

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place where no previous object
had been catalogued. This

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glowing object turned out to be
a newly flaring black hole X-ray

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binary. As matter from an
orbiting star is pulled onto a

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spinning disk surrounding the
black hole, an enormous amount

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of energy, primarily in the form
of X-rays, is released in the

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process. This black hole was
discovered just a week earlier

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by Japan’s MAXI telescope on the
International Space Station.

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Also on the ISS, NASA’s Neutron
Star Interior Composition

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Explorer telescope (NICER)
identified the X-ray blast a few

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days later. Earth’s protective
atmosphere shields our planet

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from X-rays, so these types of
blasts, like the one emitted

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from this newly discovered black
hole, can only really be
observed from

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space. And for the first time,
we made this detection from

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interplanetary space around an
asteroid.