The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a supermassive black hole seemingly without a host galaxy,European scientists reported Wednesday. Black holes, which absorb everything around it including light,mostly lurk at the heart of massive galaxies. But Hubble found a black hole that appears homeless, the scientists reported in the Nature journal.

The particular black hole, some 5 billion light years away, was discovered when a team of European scientists were hunting for quasars that are strongly associated with black holes. Quasars are extremely bright and small, presumed to be produced by cosmic gas as it is drawn toward the edge of a supermassive black hole.

Most quasars and black holes are in the middle of supermassive galaxies. The scientists studied 20 quasars and found all but one followed this pattern.

They used the Hubble telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to compare the quasars they studied with a reference star in order not to miss any galaxy surrounding the quasars. Quasars are so bright that they can outshine most galaxies around them to make the detection of galaxies difficult.

Source: Xinhua