Hubble Telescope spots a black hole that shouldn't exist

The Hubble Space Telescope hovers above the Earth

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected a supermassive black hole that defies existing theories about the universe, a new report has revealed.

The black hole is approximately 250 million times heavier than the sun, is found at the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147 and is some 140 million light years from Earth.

Around the black hole scientists noticed an “accretion disk” – debris and gas – moving around the edge.

This is unexpected: based on current theories surrounding black holes, such a disk should not exist so close to a black hole.

"We thought this was the best candidate to confirm that below certain luminosities, the accretion disk doesn't exist anymore," explained Ari Laor of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa, Israel.

"What we saw was something completely unexpected. We found gas in motion producing features we can explain only as being produced by material rotating in a thin disk very close to the black hole.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been mankind's eyes into the ever-expanding universe for the last 25 years. The telescope has been responsible for capturing some of the most breathtaking images of the universe ever seen.

Join us as we take a look at the universe's stellar tapestry with some of the iconic images from the earth-orbitting observatory.

Pictured: Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302. What resemble the creatures dainty wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!

 The report was published in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and lead author Stefano Bianchi said: “The same type of disk we see in objects that are 1,000 or even 100,000 times more luminous.”

He went on to say: "The predictions of current models for gas dynamics in very faint active galaxies clearly failed."

The disk, the report says, will give scientists the opportunity to test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.

"This is an intriguing peek at a disk very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the intensity of the gravitational pull are affecting how the photons of light look," Bianchi added.

"We cannot understand the data unless we include the theories of relativity."