Congratulations to Prof. Albert Kong and PhD student Yi-Chi Chang, the research findings have published on the NASA official website.
NTHU Astronomers Spot an Exceptionally Rare Intermediate-mass Black Hole Eating a Star
An international research team led by Prof. Albert Kong from the Institute of Astronomy at National Tsing Hua University has discovered a suspected intermediate-mass black hole that devours a hapless bypassing star in the outskirts of the galaxy NGC 6099, located in the constellation Hercules approximately 450 million light-years away from Earth. The research findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal and have caught attention from NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute, which featured the research results on the NASA official website on July 24th.
Black holes are considered among the most extraordinary objects in the universe. Currently, the existence of stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes has been widely confirmed. However, intermediate-mass black holes, whose mass falls between these two categories, are extremely rare. Yi-Chi Chang, a graduate student at the Institute of Astronomy at National Tsing Hua University, discovered a rare hyperluminous X-ray source using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. After several years of systematic tracking and research, she believes there is a high probability that this phenomenon originates from an intermediate-mass black hole devouring a star — in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event.
Official press release with related images, animation, and video from NASA:
Science paper：