'Daredevil' white dwarf star could be closest-known object to a weird black hole

An illustration shows a white dwarf teetering on the edge of destruction and a supermassive black hole.

Using the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole already noted for its mysterious behavior demonstrating another strange phenomenon.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team thinks that a dead stellar core, or white dwarf, daringly teetering on the edge of the black hole is the cause of increasingly frequent explosions of high-energy light.