Scientists studying a nearby galaxy to our solar system have discovered that a black hole in that system has managed to both not be black or particularly large, as the relatively small object glows intensely bright. This has caused scientists to reexamine how the celestial bodies radiate energy.

The system in question is called ULX-1 and is 22 million light years away from Earth in the Pinwheel Galaxy. The system has the aforementioned black hole in orbit with a star, and the two massive objects orbit each other. ULX stands for "ultraluminous X-ray source," which explains the huge amount of light coming from the black hole. The black hole manages to released huge amounts of X-ray light, which helped both fool scientists into thinking the black hole was an intermediate-mass black hole ( which has roughly 100 to 1,000 times the mass of the Sun) and lead to questions as to how the object could be so bright. Study co-author Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan had this to say in the study publish in the journal Nature and reported on by Space.com.

"As if black holes weren't extreme enough, this is a really extreme one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can...It's figured out a way to be more luminous than we thought possible."

Scientists were able to determine the mass of the black hole by studying the star that orbits ULX-1 with the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Spectroscopic analysis caused scientists to determine through the brightness of the star the celestial body's mass, which is roughly 19 times that of the Sun. Then, scientists determined the star and ULX-1 orbit each other every 8.2 days. These crucial facts then lead the team to conclude that ULX-1's mass was 20-30 times that of the Sun, putting it in the stellar black hole size range and not the intermediate-mass black hole scientists had hoped for.

Stellar black holes are formed when stars die and collapse upon themselves. Scientists were hoping ULX-1 would be the first confirmed intermediate-mass black hole, which they believe eventually form into supermassive black holes that are found in the center of most galaxies.

The research team has yet to determine why ULX-1 is so bright. The leading theory is that the black hole feeds off the stellar winds of the star that it orbits, which would lead to scientists rethinking their ideas on how ULX objects get their brightness and energy.