Outer space is indeed a vast scientific wonderland! And just recently, astronomers discovered a sleeping black hole that has finally awakened after its 26-year nap.

On June 15, an active black hole released a burst of X-rays that lit up astronomical observatories. According to Space.com, the now-active black hole was identified as an "X-ray nova," has projected a sudden increase in star luminosity that came from a binary system in the Cygnus constellation.

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So, what are black holes? Black holes are very dense, massive celestial objects that have an immensely powerful gravitational field that traps anything and everything that comes too close, including light. And occasionally, they spit out and suck in materials.

For the first time in 26 years, astronomers got ecstatic after a nearby black hole erupted. The outburst from the two-body system called V404 Cygni, which is made up of a star slightly smaller than the sun that orbits a black hole 10 times its mass, was first captured by NASA's Swift satellite. And then by a Japanese experiment on the International Space Station called Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI).

"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black hole eruptions are quite rare," Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Neil Gehrels said in a statement. "So, when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma-rays."

Since the star orbits so closely to the black hole, the massive body attracts a stream of gas away from the star. Over time, the gas forms a circle around the black hole. But when the gas is cooler, it's able to resist the black hole's pull, NBC News has learned.

Moreover, as more gas accumulates and reaches temperatures of more than 1.7 million degrees Fahrenheit, a jet of high-energy particles are emitted. These bursts are what the satellites like NASA's Swift instrument detected - albeit 80 centuries later because of the time it takes light to travel from the V404 Cygni to Earth.

Meanwhile, this stellar duo has been active before, but only at irregular intervals. In 1938 and 1956, the system was caught fluctuating in visible light. However, astronomers didn't have half of the instruments that are around today, Business Insider reported.

In 1989, another outburst was documented and was observed by instruments aboard Russia's Mir space station and a Japanese X-ray satellite called Ginga.

Outbursts like this typically only last for a few weeks to months. So in order to study the black hole in all wavelengths ranging from very low energy like radio waves to the most energetic like gamma rays, astronomers have culminated a total of nine instruments in space and on the ground before time runs out.

TagsEarth, outer space, Science