NASA - Millions of Black Holes Discovered

"NASA's WISE Telescope Discovers Millions of Black Holes" by Stephanie Mlot, PC Magazine 8/30/2012

Living up to its name, NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) telescope has uncovered millions of black holes and extreme galaxies across the universe.

Recently released images from the telescope reveal millions of dusty black hole candidates, as well as about 1,000 even dustier objects, which scientists believe are among the brightest galaxies ever discovered, and which have appropriately been nicknamed "hot DOGs," or dust-obscured galaxies.

"WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects," WISE program scientist Hashima Hasan said in a statement. "We've found an asteroid dancing ahead of Earth in its orbit, the coldest star-like orbs known and now, supermassive black hole galaxies hiding behind cloaks of dust."

Last year, the telescope put on its night-vision goggles to twice scan the entire sky with infrared light, capturing millions of images that allowed scientists to dig around for new discoveries.

Black holes had better watch their backs, said Daniel Stern, lead author of the WISE black hole study and member of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. By combining projects, the WISE telescope can find the monstrous black holes, while the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) provides a new look at their high-energy X-ray light, Stern said.

NASA launched the black-hole hunting NuSTAR in mid-June, which sported a telescope that can see the hottest, densest, most energetic objects, Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology, said in June.

In one case, NASA's device helped astronomers identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes, reaching more than 10 billion light-years away, the space association said in a news release. Generally, dust blocks the objects' visible light, NASA said, but WISE sees their warm dust glowing in infrared light.

One of the main goals of the WISE mission was met when scientists reported finding what they believed were among the brightest galaxies ever known. Despite emitting more than 100 trillion times as much light as the sun, NASA said the DOGs are so dusty that they appear only in the longest wavelengths of infrared captured by WISE.

In this case, the galaxies' eggs may have come before the chickens, WISE project scientist at JPL Peter Eisenhardt said. The lead author of a paper on the first of the DOGs, Eisenhardt said there may be evidence to prove that the galaxies formed their black holes before most of their stars.

"We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies," JPL's Jingwen Wu said in a statement.

All three published technical journal articles can be found online.

More than 100 of the objects located by WISE have been confirmed with the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as the Gemini Observatory in Chile, Palomar's Hale telescope near San Diego, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory near Tucson, Ariz., according to NASA.

For more, see the NASA video below, which simulates billions of years of evolution, which created the millions of black holes that WISE helped to discover.