Researchers have observed strange goings-on around a supermassive black hole located nearly 300 million light years away.

A black hole infamous for strange features has once again baffled astronomers, this time with rapid X-ray flashes. What could they be?

But it likely won't fall in. An artist's rendering of a white dwarf star speeding around the black hole 1ES 1927+654. A stream of particles trails the dense star. Credit: Aurore Simonnet / Sonoma ...

This is also unprecedented behavior for a black hole. If these weird episodes are the result of an orbiting white dwarf, a type of stellar remnant left behind when a star with around the mass of ...

Regular pulses of X-ray radiation emanating from a supermassive black hole could be explained by a white dwarf star on the verge of falling in ...

If this is accurate, then white holes are relics of old black holes rather than being created by more traditional processes like star collapse. White holes ought to be a very uncommon occurrence if ...

They believe the most likely culprit is a spinning white dwarf -- an extremely compact core of a dead star that is orbiting around the black hole and getting precariously closer to its event ...

and not just any star? “White dwarfs are small and compact, they’re very difficult to shred apart, so they can be very close to a black hole,” explained MIT astronomer Erin Kara, a co-author ...

such as a small black hole or a regular star, would not be able to achieve, per a statement from NASA. This helped give the team confidence that they were dealing with a white dwarf. As the black ...

They believe the most likely culprit is a spinning white dwarf—an extremely compact core of a dead star that is orbiting around the black hole and getting precariously closer to its event ...