This Black Hole Probably Shouldn’t Exist

There’s a spot in space, thousands of light-years from here, that might best be described as a cosmic amusement park. A supergiant star, so hot that it glows electric blue, and a black hole spin around each other at extraordinary speeds, orbiting so closely that some of the star’s material is pulled toward the black hole. The stellar particles swirl around the invisible object in a tilt-a-whirl of luminous reds and oranges. What the black hole doesn’t swallow, it hurls into space, producing intense jets of radiation."There is a lot going on,” James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia, told me.

Astronomers have studied this distant environment, and particularly the black hole, for decades. In fact, the black hole is the first ever discovered, after some years of research led to the breathtaking