NASA's recently launched Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) detected its first 10 supermassive black holes.
On June 13, 2012, NASA launched a new black-hole-hunter spacecraft, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). The spacecraft is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. It is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.
Last week the spacecraft "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The newly found black holes surrounded by thick disks of gas lie in distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth.
"We found the black holes serendipitously," explained David Alexander, a NuSTAR team member based in the Department of Physics at Durham University in a press release. "We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images."
Scientists predict this is the first of many such discoveries. They also plan on "combing" through the images taken by the telescope with the goal of finding black holes caught in the background. After the new finds were identified, researchers looked through previous images taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite and found that though these black holes had been detected earlier by these two spacecrafts, it wasn't until the NuSTAR observations that these black holes were brought up for closer inspections.
"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."
This X-ray glow is known as cosmic X-ray background. It peaks at the high-energy frequencies that NuSTAR is designed to see, so the mission is key to identifying what's producing the light.
"Our early results show that the more distant supermassive black holes are encased in bigger galaxies," said Daniel Stern, a co-author of the study and the project scientist for NuSTAR at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is to be expected. Back when the universe was younger, there was a lot more action with bigger galaxies colliding, merging and growing."
