Evidence found for the existence of a large population of supermassive black holes

A supermassive black hole hidden by a gas-dust cloud (artist's presentation) / NASA / ESA An

international team of astronomers led by British scientists from the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) discovered high-energy x-rays emitted by five supermassive black holes. Previously, these objects were hidden from the gaze of astronomers by cosmic dust and gas.

The discovery was made using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array(NuSTAR) - NASA's space observatory in the small space satellite program. This is a hard telescope space telescope (7-80 keV), operating on the principle of moving reflection - the reflection of x-rays and gamma rays at very small angles to the surface of the mirrors. It was launched into orbit in 2012.

We found black holes not by chance - the experiment was to test the theory that extremely active black holes are located in the centers of galaxies, which are hidden from ordinary observations by gas and dust clouds.

Prior to the commissioning of the NuSTAR telescope, this kind of observation was not possible. Now, having collected data from nine points of the sky where black holes could potentially be present, a team of researchers discovered five of the desired objects. These black holes are more active than scientists thought - they quickly absorb the surrounding matter and emit powerful fluxes of radiation.

“For a long time, we were able to observe several black holes not obscured by dust and gas, but we suspected that there were much more of them hidden from our observations,” says George Lansby, a graduate student at the Center for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University. “Thanks to NuSTAR, we first discovered these hidden monsters that we have not seen before.”

Extrapolation of the results suggests that in the universe there are huge numbers of such black holes - much more than was believed based on past observations.

Daniel Stern, a spokesman for the telescope team, said: “ High-energy x-rays penetrate further than low-energy, so we can penetrate deeper into the clouds of gas and dust. NuSTAR will help us firstly, to estimate the size of black holes, and secondly, to understand why only some of them are hidden by these clouds. ”