Black hole’s annual feast begins

Astronomers offer explanations for source of light around object with an unusual yearly behavior

BEIJING — A black hole about 290 million light-years away has just begun slurping material from its surroundings, an annual ritual revealed by a periodic brightening in X-ray wavelengths.

HLX-1, the only known intermediate-mass black hole (circled), hovers above the plane of a nearby galaxy, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image.