NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured X-ray images that were merged into one photo to show the most number of supermassive black holes ever seen so far.
The gas that falls toward black holes becomes very hot as it gets nearer the event horizon, or the point of no return, and thus produces bright X-ray emissions.
Black Holes Up To Billions Of Times More Massive Than The Sun
The photo reveals objects far more massive than the sun appearing as small dots amid a black backdrop. Supermassive black holes are the largest type of their kind, up to billions of times more massive than the sun.
The image has the highest collection of supermassive black holes that astronomers have so far observed. About 70 percent of the new image comprises supermassive black holes.
The photo also offers astronomers the best glimpse so far of how black holes grew and evolved over billions of years from soon after the Big Bang.
"The central region of this image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen," reads the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Jan. 5 press release.
Chandra's survey was aided by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble picked the target galaxies up to 13 billion light-years away from Earth while Chandra absorbed the X-rays.
How Supermassive Black Holes In The Early Universe Grow
Detecting black holes in the early universe is not easy because of their distance and they only generate radiation once they actively pull in matter. Astronomers studying what has been described as the deepest X-ray image ever obtained said that the picture allows astronomers to explore the earliest days of black holes and see how they evolved over billions of years.
Based on analysis of the Chandra data, researchers revealed that supermassive black holes in the early universe tend to grow in bursts instead of through the rather slow accretion of matter.
Started Out As Heavy Seeds With Masses Up To 100,000 Times The Solar Mass
Astronomers also discovered hints that supermassive black holes begin as heavy seeds with masses between 10,000 to 100,000 times more than that of the sun, and not as light seeds with only about a hundred times the solar mass.
This helps answer a question in astrophysics on how these black holes grow very quickly in the early universe.
X-Ray Emission From Massive Black Holes Within Distant Galaxies
The researchers also detected X-ray coming from massive galaxies up to 12. 5 billion light-years away from the Earth. The X-ray emission from most of these distant galaxies possibly comes from the large population of massive black holes within the galaxies, which weigh up to a dozen times the solar mass.
Fabio Vito, from Pennsylvania State University, said that X-rays from distant galaxies allow scientists to learn more about how black holes formed and evolved in the early universe, during their important phase of growth.
Vito and colleagues conducted a study on black hole growth in the early universe and reported this in a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Aug. 10, 2016.
