Posted by Davin Flateau on 21 Feb 2006 at 10:33 am.
Filed under General, Astronomy.
Supermassive black holes — the huge black holes at the centers of galaxies — appear to litter the Universe, according to astronomers using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory at an announcement at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis last week.
These deep, extragalactic X-ray surveys looked at carefully chosen patches of sky, that are largely free of anything that might interfere with obtaining the X-ray data. Chandra looked at the Chandra Deep Field-North — an area of sky two thirds the size of the full Moon — for the time span of 23 days over a two-year period. The researchers detected about 600 X-ray sources. After comparing the X-ray images with optical images of exactly the same slice of sky taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, nearly all 600 point sources corresponded to optical galaxies, suggesting that the black holes that were sources for the X-ray signature were in the centers of galaxies.
“X-ray astronomers are doing better than anyone else by about a factor of ten, in identifying these active galactic nuclei” said Brandt. “With more time we could do even better, going even deeper.”
What the researchers found was that super massive black holes are more numerous than we might have expected. They also found that black holes evolved differently than astronomers expected prior to the Chandra work. Extrapolating from the 600 black holes found by Chandra, Brandt suggests that there are about 300 million super massive black holes in the whole sky.
The existence of so many black holes, confirmed that what was once thought to be a truly diffuse cosmic X-ray background radiation, actually comes from point sources.
This is a major discovery - it confirms that black holes reside in many galaxies, but it also explains a previous mystery of the diffuse glow of x-rays from everywhere in the sky. With better instruments like Chandra, we now know that the diffuse glow is actually lots of tiny point sources - the x-rays bursting out of the activity around the 300 million black holes at the center of galaxies!
Stars Over Kansas » X-Rays in the Milky Way on 21 Feb 2006 at 5:24 pm: 1
[…] « My God! It’s Full of Black Holes! […]
Stevie on 4 Jun 2006 at 3:31 pm: 2
Oh My God……the right phrase to be used if ever there was one.
God is immense and beautiful…the real god….all of existence is the universe…and how immense is that!
Just look at what our Universe is made of…it truly boggles the mind and humbles us all.
Stevie on 4 Jun 2006 at 3:39 pm: 3
who the hell do I get on the phone to…no wonder the stars are all red shifted…….its not an expanding universe…..
Its a shrinking universe…at the centre of each galaxy is a super massive black hole…sucking all the stars in……
Stars in other galaxies are obviously moving away as they are sucked in…
Stars in our own galaxy that are closer to the centre of tha galaxy are being sucked in at a faster rate than us that are closer hence still a red shift.
We are moving fatser than stars further out in the galaxy so when we look at those still a red shift.
Someone talk to me about this.