The notion that the universe is likely filled with millions of supermassive black holes is quite disconcerting, yet that is exactly the conclusion arrived at by several scientists who recently used NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite and uncovered the existence of five supermassive black holes which they had previously been unable to see.
The Quest to Find Hidden Black Holes
The five supermassive black holes that the scientists uncovered had previously been obscured by enormous clouds of dust and gas. It is commonly understood that supermassive black holes exist at the center of large galaxies, but most of the time, scientists are unable to fully confirm their presence because they are covered by vast quantities of dust and gas that most telescopes are not capable of piercing through.
However, astronomers from Durham University in the United Kingdom who were conducting research on black holes were finally able to pierce through that veil. They achieved this when they aimed the NuSTAR satellite at nine galaxies and discovered that five of them had been hiding supermassive black holes at their centers.
Horrors Spread Across The Universe
Durham University’s George Lansbury, who led the study, stated, “Thanks to NuSTAR, for the first time, we have been able to clearly identify these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive because of their surrounding cocoons of material.”
His team’s findings were presented in Llandudno, Wales, at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting and published in The Astrophysical Journal. In a chilling statement, he added, “Although we have only detected five of these hidden supermassive black holes, when we extrapolate our results across the whole universe then the predicted numbers are huge and in agreement with what we would expect to see.”
The Power of the NuSTAR
NASA’s Nuclear Stereoscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite was launched in 2012 and detects black holes by searching for the highest-energy x-rays. These highest-energy x-rays are much stronger than typical x-rays and can therefore be detected by telescopes equipped to find them.
Daniel Stern, a scientist for NuSTAR at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said of NuSTAR that it “allows us to see how big the hidden monsters are, and is helping us learn why only some black holes appear obscured.”
