THIS Is The Last Thing A Lost Black Hole Satellite Saw Before It Died. This Is Beyond Belief!

Earlier this year, Japan launched a groundbreaking black-hole-monitoring satellite—only to lose control of it almost immediately under strange circumstances. Now, we finally can see what Hitomi did right before it died. When Hitomi died, though, researchers also announced that they’d managed to scrape a little bit of data from the satellite and would be detailing it in upcoming papers. Some of that data is out today in a new paper in Nature, which shows Hitomi’s final observation. It has some fascinating implications for what we know about the role of black holes in galaxy formation. Hitomi’s final observations were of the Perseus Cluster, a galaxy cluster 240 million light years away with a supermassive black hole at its center. The satellite was able to get this view of the galaxy, as well as to measure its x-ray activity: