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A back-hole system called ULX–1 has been discovered in the nearby Pinwheel Galaxy which emits twice as bright as astronomers expected, a new study states. ULX stands for “ultraluminous X-ray source.”

The Pinwheel Galaxy, which is also known as M101 is 22 million light-years from the Earth.

“The black hole is an extremely luminous one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can,” wrote study’s coauthor Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan.

The black hole is behaving something like an intermediate black hole which are between 100 to 1,000 times the mass of the sun. But the discovered black hole is just 20 times the mass of the sun.

Researchers used two NASA spacecraft, the chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory located in Hawaii to conduct their research.

“As if black holes weren’t extreme enough, this is a really extreme one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can,” study co-author Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan said in a statement. “It’s figured out a way to be more luminous than we thought possible.”

The research team is led by Jifeng Liu of ChChinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. In their spectroscopic analysis it was revealed that the companion star in ULX–1 is a big and hot type known as a Wolf-Rayet star. With this information, they concluded the possible mass of the black hole.

Jifeng Liu and his team also found that the star and the black hole, both orbited each other once in every 8.2 days.

“Our work shows, based on our conclusion of a stellar mass black hole, that our understanding of the black hole radiation mechanism is incomplete and needs revision,” Liu told SPACE.com

The study is published in the journal Nature.