The photo above shows an image of galaxy SDSS J1126+2944 that was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The black hole that lost most of its stars is pointed out by the arrow.

(University of Colorado Boulder )

A supermassive black hole may have lightened up some due to a galaxy-merged crash “diet” that has nothing to do with New Year’s resolutions.

According to Space.com, the surprisingly light black hole is one of two found in the middle of a merger between distant galaxies, now known as , which is about 1 billion light-years away from the Earth.

“One black hole is starved, and has ,” study leader Julie Comerford said in a press release. “The question is why there’s such a discrepancy.”

Currently among them, the Associated Press reports. Typically galaxies have one supermassive black hole at its center, equal to 1 million to 1 billion times the mass of the sun.

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It’s possible that the extra weight of the lighter black hole was dropped when the galaxies merged and the extreme gravitational pull stripped stars from the surrounding area, Space.com also reports. Another possibility is that the lighter black hole was never supermassive to begin with.

It could be a medium-size black hole, which weighs between 100 and 1 million times as much as the sun. These would also have less stars surrounding them, which would explain the difference.

“Theory predicts that intermediate black holes should exist, but they are difficult to pinpoint because we don’t know exactly where to look,” study co-author Scott Barrows said in the release. “This unusual galaxy may provide a rare glimpse of one of these intermediate-mass black holes.”

If galaxy SDSS J1126+2944 does hold a medium-sized black hole, it would give researches the opportunity to test the theory that supermassive black holes evolve from those that have lower mass, according to the release.

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