Infrared satellite telescope detects millions of black holes
AUG 30, 2012
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.026297
BBC : NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer ( WISE) has completed a full-sky survey of the universe. Looking at IR wavelengths, it identified more than a million potential black holes and nearly 1000 extremely hot galaxies that had previously been hidden by dust clouds. To determine whether the signals that WISE detected are black holes, a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) led by Daniel Stern used the recently launched Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array ( NuSTAR) to look at the x-ray emissions from the same sources. Another team from JPL, led by Peter Eisenhardt, examined the hot dust-obscured galaxies. Although current theory suggests most galactic black holes formed after stars, the team saw evidence that in some of these previously hidden galaxies, black holes came first.
© 2012 American Institute of Physics
