LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers have discovered what appears to be colossal belch from a massive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy. The outburst was 10 times as bright as the biggest star explosion, scientists say.

The potential super-sized black hole burp find came as astronomers studied the galaxy NGC 660, which is located 44 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces.

"The discovery was entirely serendipitous. Our observations were spread over a few years, and when we looked at them, we found that one galaxy had changed over that time from being placid and quiescent to undergoing a hugely energetic outburst at the end," study researcher Robert Minchin of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico said in a statement.

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Minchin presented the research Monday at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Long Beach.

To determine whether the outburst was from a supernova — the explosive end of a star —  or the galaxy's core, the researchers used the High Sensitivity Array, a global network of telescopes that includes the Very Long Baseline Array, the Arecibo Telescope, the National Science Foundation's 100-meter Green Bank Telescope and the 100-meter Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.

Instead of an expanding ring of material suggesting a supernova event, the researchers found five locations with bright radio emissions clustered around the galaxy's core.

"The most likely explanation is that there are jets coming from the core, but they are precessing, or wobbling, and the hot spots we see are where the jets slammed into the material near the galaxy's nucleus," said Chris Salter, also of the Arecibo Observatory.

Those jets, the researchers said, would mean the outburst likely came from a supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 660. As the black hole devours dust and mass, it pulls a whirling disk of matter into its heart that spews jets of particles as it is consumed.

Supermassive black holes are colossal structures at the cores of galaxies that are between millions and billions of times as massive as the sun. They are much larger than stellar-mass black holes, which are created from the deaths of giant stars and can contain the mass of about 10 suns.

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• Photos: Black Holes of the Universe
• The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe
• Black Hole Quiz: How Well Do You Know Nature's Weirdest Creations?

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A simulation based on data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission has determined that about one out of every six stars has an Earth-sized planet, which would translate to at least 17 billion such worlds in our Milky Way galaxy. And that's not even counting the alien Earths we'd want to live on.

These 17 billion planets would be circling their parent stars more closely than Mercury orbits our own sun — which means that, in many cases, the planets would be too hot for liquid water to exist. A few such worlds already have been found, including a "lava planet" known as Alpha Centauri Bb that's just 4.3 light-years away from us.

Someday, the type of simulation that astronomers used to estimate the number of hot Earths can be used to estimate how many habitable Earths could provide a home for life as we know it in the Milky Way. But not just yet.

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"For an estimate of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone, it's simply too early to call," said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA.

Fressin and his colleagues lay out their estimates for Earth-sized planets, as well as bigger worlds, in a paper that's been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Their research is being discussed today at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Long Beach, Calif.

The estimates are based on a list of 2,400 planet candidates that have been detected by the Kepler probe since its launch in 2009. Kepler looks for planets in a patch of sky overlapping the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, by checking for the faint dimming of a star as an alien world passes across its disk. One of the challenges is to make sure the dimming is really caused by a planet, rather than some other phenomenon such as an eclipsing binary star. Another challenge is that Kepler is sure to miss some planets, because those planets are not in a position to block the light of its parent star, as seen from Earth.

Now that the Kepler mission has been churning out detections for more than three years, there's enough of a database to arrive at some statistical conclusions about the total number of planets in the Milky Way — at least 100 billion. There's also enough data to determine what the breakdown of detections should be, and even how many of those detections will be wrong.

"We have a knowledge of false positives that's good enough that we can do a study from scratch," Fressin said.

The simulation suggests that the false-positive rate should vary depending on the size of the planet candidates, from a low of 6.7 percent for small Neptune-scale planets to a high of 17.7 percent for Jupiter-type giants. The false-positive rate for close-in planets between 0.8 and 1.25 times as wide as Earth is 12.3 percent. When all these factors were added to the calculations, the astronomers arrived at a breakdown for five types of planets currently detectable by Kepler:

• 17 percent for Earths with orbital periods up to 85 days.
• 26 percent for super-Earths (1.25 to 2 times as wide as Earth) with orbits up to 145 days.
• 26 percent for small Neptunes (2 to 4 times Earth's width) with orbits up to 245 days.
• 3 percent for large Neptunes (4 to 6 times Earth's width) with orbits up to 418 days.
• 5 percent for giants (6 to 22 times Earth's width) with orbits up to 418 days.

The results indicate that for every size of planet except for gas giants, the type of star doesn't matter. Earth-sized planets should be just as likely to form around red dwarfs as around sunlike stars. That runs counter to what was previously thought.

"Earths and super-Earths aren't picky. We're finding them in all kinds of neighborhoods," the CfA's Guillermo Torres, a co-author of the study, said in a news release.

The researchers emphasized that these are just minimum estimates — and that as Kepler provides more planet candidates at smaller scales and wider orbits, the numbers could increase. Eventually, such simulations could spit out a long-sought number: the tally of Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way expected to have conditions capable of supporting life.

"This result is a significant step towards the determination of eta-earth, the occurrence of Earthlike planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars," they wrote in their research paper.

More about the planet search:

• Kepler mission adds 461 potential planets to list
• 'Exocomets' are common across the Milky Way
• 2013 might be the year for first 'alien Earth'
• Alien planets face danger from binary stars
• Cosmic Log archive on the planet search

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In addition to Fressin and Torres, the authors of "The False Positive Rate of Kepler nd the Occurrence of Planets" include David Charbonneau, Stephen Bryson, Jessie Christiansen, Courtney Dressing, Jon Jenkins, Lucianne Walkowicz and Natalie Batalha.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Even the astronomers on the science team for NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission are marveling at the new worlds they're finding.

There's certainly a lot to marvel at: Just this week, Kepler astronomers announced the discovery of not just one, but two binary-star systems that have at least one planet each, reviving visions of the double sunset on Luke Skywalker's home world in the "Star Wars" saga. Another group of scientists drew on data from Kepler to detect the three smallest exoplanets yet discovered, including one just about the size of Mars.

The revelations at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Austin, Texas, demonstrated that the number and diversity of the planets being found beyond our own solar system is growing by leaps and bounds. An august group of space commentators, including yours truly, celebrated the diversity during today's Weekly Space Hangout. And astronomers were celebrating in Austin as well.

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"Any kind of system you can think of, if it doesn't violate the laws of nature, it probably exists somewhere out there," Virginia Trimble, an astronomer at the University of California at Irvine, told reporters. "So as long as people think up new techniques, they will also find new types of planets. There will surely be lots of new, neat stuff in the coming years."

In an email, Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, who has been in on the planet quest for 20 years and is a member of the Kepler science team, went positively gushy over the latest findings ... but also pointed out that the quest has really just begun:

"The NASA Kepler space telescope has discovered well over 2,000 strong candidate planets around other stars.  No exoplanet survey is even close to this coverage and statistical integrity.

"For each of those exoplanets Kepler finds, we have detailed knowledge of the planet's orbital period and the planet's orbital distance from its host star. More impressively, we know the planet's size (diameter) quite accurately. For some of the planets, we have also measured their mass and density, with some planets found to be definitively solid.

"With this wealth of information about over 2,000 planets, we continue to study the occurrence of planets around other stars. This work gives us a census of planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The 2,000 exoplanets is still too few to give an accurate answer. A useful census of humans on Earth requires that well over 2,000 people be surveyed. So it is with planets in the Milky Way galaxy. A useful census requires that thousands be sampled, and with accuracy. We desire integrity in our surveys of planets and people.

"Three weeks ago, the Kepler team announced the first two Earth-size planets. Only Kepler has sensitivity to Earth-size planets. [Now we have announced] the first Mars-size planet around another star. ... These discoveries by Kepler will mark an historic moment in the history of science, approaching the trans-oceanic voyages of the 15th century and the first steps on the moon.   Kepler is indeed finding new worlds."

The Kepler mission identifies potential new worlds by looking for the telltale dips of starlight that occur when a planet passes over the disk of its parent sun. Other methods are used to confirm the mass of alien planets, including a method that checks for a characteristic gravitational wobble in stars that have planets. And yet another method, called microlensing, was used in another study released this week that estimated there could be 160 billion planets in the Milky Way. There's a chance that estimate will turn out to be too high. There's a better chance it'll turn out to be too low. But in either case, astronomers now recognize there could be tens of billions of new worlds out there.

Some of those worlds no doubt will have the conditions conducive to life as we know it. Studying such planets could help us one of the deepest questions we have about the universe: Are we alone?

But in order to do that, the quest has to continue. Right now, funding for the $600 million Kepler mission is due to run out in November, and discussions about an extension are under way. Theoretically, Kepler could gather enough data by November to detect Earth-size planets in Earth-scale orbits around sunlike stars, but an extension would provide scientists with more confidence about their existing candidates — and also give them the chance to cast a wider net.

Chances are the mission will be extended. "It would seem to me just nuts to have it out there and turn it off," one astronomer, Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Space.com. But the success of Kepler (and its European counterpart, COROT) should get people talking about what to do for an encore. So brace yourself for an alphabet soup of exoplanet-mission acronyms ranging from EChO to MPF to PLATO to WFIRST.

Odds and ends from the week in space:

• Hey, kids! Want to keep up with the lengthening list of exoplanets? Check out Hanno Rein's free Exoplanet app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. There are planet catalogs for other mobile platforms as well, such as Exoplanet Catalog for Android and the Astronomy app for Windows Phone. Got more apps? Add your recommendations in a comment below.
• Speaking of apps, Powellware's newly released Mars Images app is getting some good reviews. The app for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Android delivers the latest images from NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars.
• Remember the big radio-telescope array that Jodie Foster was plugged into when she heard the alien transmissions in the movie "Contact"? The real-life telescope complex in New Mexico where those scenes were filmed has been known as the Very Large Array, but during the AAS meeting, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that it'll be renamed the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to honor Karl Jansky, the founder of radio astronomy. The name was selected from among 23,331 suggestions submitted by 17,023 people from more than 65 countries, the NRAO said. The new moniker will no doubt be shortened to the Jansky VLA, or the Jansky Array.
• If you've got an hour to spare, watch the Weekly Space Hangout video above, in which I and other Web-based worthies hold forth on a variety of out-of-this-world topics. And if you've got another hour to spare, perhaps while you're exercising at the gym, listen to last week's "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast, featuring my chat with Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams. And stay tuned for the Feb. 1 installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," when we'll be talking about science policy and politics.

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

X-ray and radio observations have revealed how a black hole winds up and pitches fastballs made of ionized gas at a quarter of the speed of light. That's about 1.6 million times faster than the fastest fastball ever pitched on Earth.

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The pitches were clocked during an outburst from the black hole system H1743-322 in mid-2009. using NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array. The binary system, 28,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, consists of a normal star and a black hole that are gravitationally bound together. The black hole sucks material in a continuous stream from the star, drawing it down in a swirling disk.

Some of the superheated material radiates away from the black hole's surroundings in two jets that point in opposite directions. Every once in a while, hot ionized gas bunches up into huge "bullets" that are wound up and flung out from the disk. RXTE and the VLBA spotted a couple of the bullets as they sped away in early June 2009.

"Like a referee at a sports game, we essentially rewound the footage on the bullets' progress, pinpointing when they were launched," Gregory Sivakoff of the University of Alberta said Tuesday in a NASA news release. "With the unique capabilities of RXTE and the VLBA, we can associate their ejection with changes that likely signaled the start of the process."

By comparing the X-ray observations of H1743-322 and the radio emissions from the blobs of gas, astronomers were able to figure a timeline for the interactions in the disk and the ejection of the fastballs. Sivakoff presented the research team's findings this week in Austin, Texas, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and a paper on the observations will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"This research provides new clues about the conditions needed to initiate a jet and can guide our thinking about how it happens," said Chris Done, an astrophysicist at the University of Durham in England who was not involved in the study.

Rest in peace, Rossi
The study serves as a sendoff of sorts for the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, which was decommissioned last week after 16 years of science operations. "The spacecraft and its instruments had been showing their age, and in the end RXTE had accomplished everything we put it up there to do, and much more," Tod Strohmayer, RXTE project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the space agency's obituary for the probe.

RXTE played a part in mapping the space-time shift around spinning black holes and neutron stars, detecting a black hole's X-ray "heartbeat," figuring out what's behind our galaxy's X-ray glow, studying a superflare blasted out from the Crab Nebula and observing many other extreme phenomena.

NASA says the 7,000-pound satellite is expected to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up sometime between 2014 and 2023, depending largely on how solar activity affects the decay of its orbit.

More from this week's astronomy meeting:

• Zoom in on the black hole next door
• Astronomers share galactic glories
• Hubble spots primordial galaxy cluster
• Three newfound worlds are smaller than Earth
• Scientists find most distant supernova of its kind

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best view yet of the Andromeda Galaxy's nucleus — which is actually a double nucleus, thanks to the galaxy's supermassive black hole.

Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, and the only galaxy outside our own that's visible to the naked eye. But it's not easy to see what's going on at the bright center of the spiral. Astronomer Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory put together several exposures in blue and ultraviolet wavelengths from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to produce this ultra-sharp view.

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The inset photograph tells the story: The black hole itself can't be seen, but it's near the center of a compact cluster of blue stars at the center of the inset. That cluster is surrounded by the double nucleus, an elliptical ring of older reddish stars in orbit around the black hole.

"When the stars are at the farthest point in their orbit they move slower, like cars on a crowded freeway," NASA says in its image advisory. "This gives the illusion of a second nucleus."

NASA notes that the blue stars in the cluster are no more than 200 million years old, and had to have formed close to where they are now. Such stars wouldn't last long enough to form somewhere else and move inward.

So how can stars form so deep within the black hole's gravitational field? That's what Lauer and other astronomers are trying to figure out.

Lauer presented the Hubble observations this week in Austin, Texas, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

More from the astronomy meeting:

• Astronomers share galactic glories
• Hubble spots primordial galaxy cluster
• Three newfound worlds are smaller than Earth
• Scientists find most distant supernova of its kind

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.