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Some black holes are just meant to survive, regardless of what they go through. This is probably the case with the HLX-1 black hole, 20.000 times more massive than the Sun, which is practically floating on the outskirts of a galaxy.

The problem with this supermassive black hole is that judging by its size, should be at the center of a galaxy and not on the outskirts; the only logical conclusion they could draw was that it somehow survived whatever catastrophic event destroyed its galaxy.

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Hubble also detected large amounts of energetic blue light coming from the black hole’s accretion disk, generating X-Rays. But aside from this normal radiation, researchers also spotted something which shouldn’t be there: cooler, red light.

HLX-1 was probably formed in a dwarf galaxy that once orbited ESO 243-49. But we live in a dog-eat-dog galaxy, or better said, a galaxy-eat-galaxy; and when the dwarf galaxy came too close to ESO 243-49, the galaxy practically wiped off all its surrounding stars, leaving the exposed black hole. HLX-1 may now be following the same fate as its parent galaxy, slowly getting sucked into ESO 243-49.

Via Wiredga