In a major milestone, Nasa’s new black-hole-hunter spacecraft — NuSTAR — has detected its first 10 supermassive black holes, lying at the hearts of distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth.
The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures, researchers said.
The new black-hole finds are the first of hundreds expected from the mission over the next two years.
These gargantuan structures - black holes surrounded by thick disks of gas - lie at the hearts of distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth.
“We found the black holes serendipitously,” said David Alexander, a NuSTAR team member based in the Department of Physics at Durham University in England and lead author of the study.
“We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images,” said Alexander.
Additional serendipitous finds such as these are expected for the mission, researchers said.
Along with the mission’s more targeted surveys of selected patches of sky, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR team plans to comb through hundreds of images taken by the telescope with the goal of finding black holes caught in the background.