More Supermassive Black Holes Than We Thought!

LeadSongDog writes: The Royal Astronomical Society reports five supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that were previously hidden by dust and gas have been uncovered. The discovery suggests there may be millions more supermassive black holes in the universe than were previously thought. George Lansbury, a postgraduate student in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, at Durham University, said: “For a long time we have known about supermassive black holes that are not obscured by dust and gas, but we suspected that many more were hidden from our view. Thanks to NuSTAR for the first time we have been able to clearly see these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive because of their ‘buried’ state. Although we have only detected five of these hidden supermassive black holes, when we extrapolate our results across the whole Universe then the predicted numbers are huge and in agreement with what we would expect to see.”

Comments

ESA science

[Tailhook]

It's really great that the ESA is doing such great space science today. While NASA is off draining its resources on space cowboys and bloated contractor budgets the ESA is pioneering novel astronomy and leading the way, with no manned program at all.

If only the US would do programs like SMEX-11 (Small Explorer satellite program) like the ESA does instead of their "heavy" lift stuff we would know so much more about the universe.