Science Alert: This past March, a NASA instrument on the International Space Station spotted a black hole, about 10,000 light-years away from Earth, in the process of devouring a star. What happened next was weird, even by the standards of super-dense celestial objects from which not even light can escape: the black hole started to shrink.
It started with the length of about the width of Massachusetts, according to MIT, and ended up at about ten kilometers (6.2 miles) – the length of a moderate footrace.
According to an MIT blog post about the finding, which was described in a recent paper in the journal Nature, the size of the black hole’s corona – that’s the ring of particles that surrounds its mouth – turned into a ghost of its former self.
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