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In pictures, the object discovered by Marianne Heida, looks like nothing more than a speck of light on the edge of a swirling cloud. But the unassuming shape is thought to be a giant black hole, more than a billion times the mass of the sun, flying at 670,000 miles per hour through space. Miss Heida, a student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, made the discovery as part of a final-year project.
Working with experts at the Dutch space research institute SRON, she was cataloguing thousands of sources of X-rays in space when she noticed one bright spot which appeared to be radically out of place – on the edge of a galaxy rather than the centre.
The object, more than half a billion light years away, was so intense such that scientists believe it is likely to be a black hole.
Her project, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is thought to be the first time that the phenomenon has been captured.
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