Millions of elusive black holes lurk throughout our Milky Way galaxy, only occasionally revealing their presence in bursts of X-rays as they devour another star..

U.S. astronomers have been able to locate eight rare pairs of relatively small black holes and the stars orbiting them thanks to their X-ray echoes, according to CNN.. Previously, there were only two known pairs in our galaxy emitting X-ray echoes..

The results of the study, published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal, could help scientists understand how black holes evolve.. A research team has developed an automated tool to search for echoes from binary black holes in satellite data.. This instrument was called the "

In the study, scientists used a reverberation machine to view data collected by NASA's X-ray telescope called NICER, which is part of the International Space Station..

“We found new signs of reverberation in eight sources,” said one of the authors of the study, Jinyi Wang, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.. “These black holes have masses between 5 and 15 solar masses, and they are all in binary systems with normal low-mass sun-like stars.”.

When black holes suck matter out of a star in their orbit, they can sometimes emit jets, a kind of “belch” - bright jets of particles that rush into space at close to the speed of light. After such a high-energy outburst, the black hole again goes into a low-energy state.

“The role of black holes in the evolution of galaxies is an unresolved issue in modern astrophysics,” said study author Erin Kara, assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.. “So by understanding the flares in these small systems, we can understand how such flares in supermassive black holes affect the entire galaxies at the centers of which they are located.”.

Echoes from such X-ray emissions could help astronomers map the location of black holes in our galaxy.. This is not unlike the echolocation used by bats to navigate.. But black hole echoes aren't real sounds we can hear unaided.. “We are just starting to use these light echoes to reconstruct what surrounds a black hole,” Kara said. “Now we can explore the connections between a black hole’s disk, jet, and corona in new ways.”.

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Black hole? - a region of space-time, the gravitational attraction of which is so great that even objects moving at the speed of light, including quanta of light itself, cannot leave it. The boundary of this region is called the event horizon..