NASA reveals ‘huge rings’ surrounding black hole in distant star system

NASA this week revealed dazzling imagery of “spectacular” X-ray rings surrounding a black hole in a star system thousands of light-years from Earth.

The rings, captured using NASA's Chandra X-ray and Neil Gehrels Swift observatories, “revealed new information about dust located in our Galaxy,” the space agency said in a press release.

The black hole “is part of a binary system called V404 Cygni, located about 7,800 light-years away from Earth,” the release said. The astronomical gravity well “is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object.”

The rings “tell astronomers not only about the black hole's behavior, but also about the landscape between V404 Cygni and Earth,” NASA said.

“For example, the diameter of the rings in X-rays reveals the distances to the intervening dust clouds the light ricocheted off.”