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A mysterious black hole surrounded by a thin 'accretion' disk of gases and other cosmic debris that astronomers claim 'shouldn't exist' has been discovered at the heart of a spiral galaxy.
NGC 3147, found around 130 million light-years away in the Draco constellation, was uncovered by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The supermassive black hole, which weighs roughly 250 million times more than the sun, shouldn't have a disk of matter surrounding it, according to Einstein's theories of relativity.
That's because NGC 3147's black hole is currently 'starving', due to a lack of material to feed on in the region, and starving black holes don't usually have an accretion disk around them, experts say.
Instead, light given off by the object at the centre of NGC 3147 mimics the behaviour of a supermassive black hole at the centres of much more active galaxies.