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Home Space Astrophysics

NASA’s black-hole-hunter finds its first 10 supermassive black holes

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
September 10, 2013
in Astrophysics, Space

NASA’s black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has located its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission is the first ever which can focus the highest energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.

nustar

If everything goes as NASA planned, then over the next two years, the mission will locate several hundreds of such structures. It is currently thought that supermassive black holes lie at at the hearts of most galaxies, including our own.

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“We found the black holes serendipitously,” explained David Alexander, a NuSTAR team member based in the Department of Physics at Durham University in England and lead author of a new study appearing Aug. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal. “We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images.”

But even serendipitous findings such as this one are part of the plan – along with the mission’s main targets, NuSTAR team plans to comb through hundreds of images taken by the telescope with the goal of finding any hidden black holes in the background. By combining these types of data, astronomers hope to find more about possibly the most interesting and mysterious objects in the Universe.

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“We are getting closer to solving a mystery that began in 1962,” said Alexander. “Back then, astronomers had noted a diffuse X-ray glow in the background of our sky but were unsure of its origin. Now, we know that distant supermassive black holes are sources of this light, but we need NuSTAR to help further detect and understand the black hole populations.”

NuSTAR-black-hole2

The X-ray glow, now known as cosmic X-ray background, peaks at the high-energy frequencies that NuSTAR is designed to see, so the mission ultimately aims at explaining what causes and influences this type of radiation.

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“The highest-energy X-rays can pass right through even significant amounts of dust and gas surrounding the active supermassive black holes,” said Fiona Harrison, a study co-author and the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

For more information about NuSTAR and other news about the mission check these two pages: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/.

Via NASA.

Tags: background radiationNuSTARsupermassive blackholex-ray
Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

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