A rare phenomenon was spotted on June 15 when a NASA satellite measured a large burst of x-rays coming from a black hole, being circled by a star some 8,000 light-years away from Earth.

The black hole, which sits in V404 Cygni binary system, had been sucking gas from a nearby star which is only slightly smaller than the Sun.

The gas was travelling to a storage disk surrounding the black hole. After some time the gas heated up so much, it fell into the hole and x-rays shot from its centre.

According to NASA this happens once a torrent of stored gas rushes suddenly toward either a neutron star or a black hole.

NASA put together an animation back in 2012 of a very similar event, and used it to display the current phenomenon.

The event is called an X-ray nova. Until recently the black hole has remained stable since 1989.

The star in question, which is only a tenth the mass of the black hole, orbits it in only 6.5 days.

The event was also spotted by the Japanese experiment on the International Space Station called the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image.