Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has led to the discovery of a bonanza of black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy.
After analysing 150 observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory data, the space agency was able to discover 26 black hole candidates in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way. This is reportedly the largest number of black holes to be identified outside the Milky Way. According to a press release by NASA, the two galaxies are predicted to ultimately collide several billion years from today.
Robin Barnard of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., and lead author says that while the new discovery is exciting he presumes that the number of black holes they have discovered is just the "tip of the iceberg" as many black holes are not visible to the Earth.
According to the report, many of these black holes were created by the death of very big stars and have masses five to 10 times that of our Sun. Astronomers were able to detect these otherwise invisible black holes because of the materials that were being pulled from a companion star and heated up to produce radiation before it disappeared into the black hole. Previously, nine black hole candidates were identified within the region covered by the Chandra data, and the present results increase the total to 35. Eight of these are associated with globular clusters, the ancient concentrations of stars distributed in a spherical pattern around the center of the galaxy. Seven of the black holes discovered are at a distance of 1,000 light-years of the Andromeda Galaxy's center.
"When it comes to finding black holes in the central region of a galaxy, it is indeed the case where bigger is better," said co-author Stephen Murray of Johns Hopkins University and CfA in a press release. "In the case of Andromeda we have a bigger bulge and a bigger supermassive black hole than in the Milky Way, so we expect more smaller black holes are made there as well."
The new findings will be published in the June 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
