An Indian origin led team of astronomers, has for the first time, spotted a black hole belching out a burst of gamma rays after gulping down part of a nearby star.

At first the phenomenon looked like another ordinary long Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) in a distant galaxy. GRBs are thought to be the death cries of massive stars collapsing to form black holes.

But this GRB, named GRB 070610 after the date of its discovery by NASA's Swift satellite on June 10, 2007, seemed to have a different origin altogether, said Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech in Pasadena, US.

Her team traced the burst to a star system in the Milky Way galaxy, where a black hole and a star slightly less massive than the Sun are orbiting each other.

She believes that the black hole in the system had some kind of a giant hiccup while chomping down on matter stolen from its companion star.

As this gamma-ray hiccup behaviour has never been seen before, scientists are not in a position to explain it.

She said though the burst was much less powerful than typical long GRBs, such events are still quite violent. A similar system called V4641 Sgr set the record for spewing matter out at the highest speed ever observed in our galaxy during a similar outburst, observed in X-rays, in 1999.

"Observing this black hole outburst from nearby would be a risky prospect. If you were as close to the black hole as the (companion) star, things wouldn't be pretty. I don't think you'd want to be near it," New Scientist quoted Kasliwal as saying.

Kasliwal further said the reason astronomers haven't spotted something like this before is that they are very low energy events.

"This kind of event is probably much more common than the ones normally observed by Swift. The reason, we haven't seen something like this before, is not because it's rare, but because it's a low-energy event," said Kasliwal.

"The burst is intrinsically about 100 trillion times less powerful than previously observed long GRBs. If the same thing happened in another galaxy, we just don't have detectors that are sensitive enough to see it," she said.