NASA | MSFC | SAO | Chandra X-ray Observatory | 2020 Jul 15
A team of researchers has identified a group of black holes that had previously been mistaken for a different kind of black hole, as described in our latest press release. This discovery has important implications for understanding how supermassive black holes grow and evolve over billions of years.A Quick Look at Cases of Black Hole Mistaken IdentityClick to play embedded YouTube video.
The misjudged black holes were found in the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), the deepest X-ray image ever taken. The main panel of the graphic shows the CDF-S, which contains over 7 million seconds of observing time from Chandra collected over many years. In this image, red, green, and blue represent the low, medium, and high-energy X-rays that Chandra can detect. Most of the points in this image are a black hole.
This latest work combines X-rays from Chandra in the CDF-S with large amounts of data at different wavelengths from other observatories, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The team looked at black holes located 5 billion light years or more away from Earth in this patch of sky. At these distances, scientists had already found 67 heavily obscured, growing black holes with both X-ray and infrared data in the CDF-S. In this latest study, the authors identified another 28, highlighted by circles in a labeled version of the image. Optical and infrared images for four of these 28 are shown in a separate graphic. ...
A Large Population of Obscured AGN in Disguise as
Low-Luminosity AGN in Chandra Deep Field South ~ Erini L. Lambrides et al
- Astrophysical Journal 897(2):160 (2020 Jul 10) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab919c
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2002.00955 > 03 Feb 2020 (v1), 13 May 2020 (v2)