The birth of a black hole: Scientists believe they have found the youngest in our galaxy at just 1,000 years old

NASA has released an astonishing image of what they believe is the youngest black hole in the Milky Way galaxy and, in space terms at least, it's just around the corner.

Information from the agency's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a telescope that observes the cosmos from an orbit 139,000 kilometres above the Earth, suggests that the supernova remnant's oddly-shaped clouds of glowing gas may contain a young black hole, The Daily Mail reports.

The remnant, called W49B, is about 1,000 years old. That is equivalent to a blink of an eye in a universe believed to be nearly 14 billion years old. Our own sun has clocked up 4.5billion years.

It's also just 26,000 light years away and was created in a very rare way, reports the Los Angeles Times.
'It appears its parent star ended its life in a way that most others don’t,' said Laura Lopez, who led the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NASA said the supernova explosion that occurred when this star ran out of fuel was 'peculiar'.
The star exploded with 'jets shooting away from the star’s poles' — making the supernova elongated and elliptical. Usually, the explosions tend to be symmetrical.

Supernova explosions occur when massive stars run out of fuel, but NASA notes such blasts are not well understood.
Another surprising element is that there was no neutron star. Normally, the collapse of some massive stars leaves a dense, spinning core, but not this one.

Megan Watzke, press officer at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, said it’s that lack of evidence that points to the existence of a black hole.

'In this case… the lack of pulsations from the other possible explanation (a rapidly rotating dense star called a neutron star) add to the evidence that a black hole is there,' Watzke said.

'In other situations, however, astronomers can detect the black hole’s presence by its influence on the material around it.'

The possible black hole and the reason behind it remain something of a mystery.
As Lopez says in a blog post, these 'exotic explosions can happen within our own galaxy, and further study… will give great insights into how these awesome events come about'.

NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999. The findings about W49B will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.