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hidden black holes; The insatiable monsters of the universe are much more than you can imagine

Black holes hide behind donuts

Borman explains that the feeding and growth of massive black holes is not possible without some kind of reservoir of material around them. He says:

It is believed that the material around the black hole can be shaped like a donut. Depending on the orientation of that object towards our own line of sight or the center of the object, we will see a very bright accretion disk or a very dark one. Previously, researches have shown that this darkness can hide 15% of feeding massive black holes from our view.

Borman and his colleagues tested their idea with infrared data from NASA’s Nuclear Spectrometer Array Telescope (NuSTAR) spacecraft as part of a project called NuLANDS (NuSTAR AGN NH Local Distribution Survey).

The result was the visualization of infrared light emanating from the clouds surrounding supermassive black holes. In this way, the researchers were able to arrive at the first refined census of black holes that grow by consuming material around them. Pushak Gandhi, a member of the University of Southampton research group, said in a statement:

Although black holes are dark, the gas around them heats up and glows intensely, making them some of the brightest objects in the universe. Even when they are hidden, the surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits this light as infrared radiation, thus revealing the presence of their black holes. We have found that many black holes are hidden from view, hidden behind gas and dust, making them invisible to conventional telescopes.

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Finding hidden feeding black holes could help explain how they grow to such incredibly massive sizes. It can also paint a better picture of how galaxies evolve. Gandhi says:

If we didn’t have black holes, galaxies could be much larger. If we didn’t have a supermassive black hole in our Milky Way Galaxy, there might be more stars in the sky. This is just one example of how black holes can affect galaxy evolution.

Borman explains that if we could see the nutritional content of the universe’s supermassive black holes, our view of the universe would change. “If our eyes could detect X-rays, we would see the sky full of dots,” he says. “Each of these points is an accreting supermassive black hole.”

The researchers’ findings were published on December 30 in the journal Astrophysics.

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