The blue dots in this field of galaxies, known as the COSMOS field, show galaxies that contain supermassive black holes emitting high-energy X-rays. Telescopes and their handlers have become rather adept at locating black holes with modest songs, but until recently, those that really belt it out have been hard to find.
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According to EurekAlert, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has found, for the first time, large numbers of black holes emitting high-energy X-rays.
“We’ve gone from resolving just 2 percent of the high-energy X-ray background to 35 percent”, Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator and lead author of the new study describing the findings, said in the same statement.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory succeeded in identifying numerous objects creating the space melody, but the loudest voices continued to remain a mystery.
When black holes pull in matter, they let out powerful X-ray bursts, filling the entire sky in a phenomenon called the cosmic X-ray background. These active black holes cause their accretion disks to generate huge quantities of X-rays and the energy of this radiation gives astronomers clues as to black holes’ feeding habits and therefore their evolution.
“We’ve gone from resolving just two percent of the high-energy X-ray background to 35 percent”. “We can see the most obscured black holes, hidden in thick gas and dust”.
The results obtained by the scientists will hopefully help understand how black holes’ growth patterns change over time, which us one of the key factors in the development of these celestial bodies and their host galaxies.
Black holes emit X-rays when the gas and dust surrounding them gets heated and accelerated to almost the speed of light.
As black holes grow, their intense gravity sucks matter towards them. This makes the temperature of the matter to rise, while the particles get accelerated to the speed of light. By using NuSTAR, astronomers are now able to fill in the high-energy X-Ray background. “To untangle what’s going on, you have to pinpoint and count up the individual sources of the X-rays”.
“We knew this cosmic choir had a strong high-pitched component, but we still don’t know if it comes from a lot of smaller, quiet singers, or a few with loud voices”, Daniel Stern of NASA said.
Although black holes continue to baffle the greatest minds in astronomy and science in many aspects, one of its mysteries has been solved thanks to NuStar’s discovery of a chorus of black holes.
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High-energy X-rays could unveil what is present around most obscured supermassive black holes as such these things could not be easily seen. The team will continue to take more images of the high-energy X-ray background with NuSTAR in order to get a better look at the raucous X-ray voices in the universe’s choir. When did they start and stop growing? It’s easy for telescopes and instruments to detect a black hole that can sing a quick and simple song, but what about songs that, um, go beyond the already-classic “Black Hole Sun” and head into Freddie Mercury or Robert Plant territory if compared to musical epic-ness? JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
