“It amazes me how useful IRAS and NuSTAR were for this project, especially despite IRAS being operational over 40 years ago,” said study lead Peter Boorman, an astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “I think it shows the legacy value of telescope archives and the benefit of using multiple instruments and wavelengths of light together.”
Numerical Advantage
Determining the number of hidden black holes compared to nonhidden ones can help scientists understand how these black holes get so big. If they grow by consuming material, then a significant number of black holes should be surrounded by thick clouds and potentially obscured. Boorman and his coauthors say their study supports this hypothesis.
In addition, black holes influence the galaxies they live in, mostly by impacting how galaxies grow. This happens because black holes surrounded by massive clouds of gas and dust can consume vast — but not infinite — amounts of material. If too much falls toward a black hole at once, the black hole starts coughing up the excess and firing it back out into the galaxy. That can disperse gas clouds within the galaxy where stars are forming, slowing the rate of star formation there.
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“If we didn’t have black holes, galaxies would be much larger,” said Poshak Gandhi, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and a coauthor on the new study. “So if we didn’t have a supermassive black hole in our Milky Way galaxy, there might be many more stars in the sky. That’s just one example of how black holes can influence a galaxy’s evolution.”
More About NuSTAR
A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information on NuSTAR, visit:
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Feed By Today and Features – NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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