Posted on Jul 16, 2020 in Astronomy, Black Holes

With our new identifications weve found a bunch of heavily obscured black holes that had previously been missed, said astrophysicist Erini Lambrides of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland, about the discovery of a type of growing supermassive black hole formed billions of years ago masquerading as another using a survey known as the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), the deepest X-ray image ever taken (above).

The CDF-S contains the highest concentration of black holes ever seen, equivalent to 5,000 over the area on the sky covered by the full Moon. The true identity of these black holes the ultimate extreme of a moment in timehelps solve a long-running mystery in astrophysics.

Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in surrounding material, which is heated and produces radiation at a wide range of wavelengths including X-rays, including a phase, which happened billions of years ago, when a dense cocoon of dust and gas covers most black holes. These cocoons of material are the fuel source that enables the black hole to grow and generate radiation.

Hidden in Cocoons

Based on the current picture held by astronomers many black holes buried in heavily obscured cocoons should exist, but are notoriously difficult to find, reports the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Until now the observed number has fallen short of predictionseven in the deepest images like the CDF-S.

With our new identifications weve found a bunch of heavily obscured black holes that had previously been missed, said Lambrides who led the study. We like to say we found these giant black holes, but they were really there all along.

Unveiled Over 80 Days

The latest study combined over 80 days of Chandra observing time in the CDF-S with large amounts of data at different wavelengths from other observatories, including NASAs Hubble Space Telescope and NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope. The team looked at black holes located 5 billion light years or more away from Earth. At these distances, scientists had already found 67 heavily obscured, growing black holes with both X-ray and infrared data in the CDF-S. In this latest study, the authors identified another 28.

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These 28 supermassive black holes were previously categorized differentlyeither as slowly growing black holes with low density or nonexistent cocoons, or as distant galaxies.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

This could be considered a case of mistaken black hole identity, said co-author Marco Chiaberge of Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, but these black holes are exceptionally good at hiding exactly what they are.

Lambrides and her colleagues compared their data with expectations for a typical growing black hole. Using data from all of the wavelengths except for X-rays, they predicted the amount of X-rays they should be detecting from each black hole. The researchers found a much lower level of X-rays than they expected from 28 sources, which implies that the cocoon around them is about ten times denser than scientists previously estimated for these objects.

Supermassive Black Holes Could Actually Be Enigmatic Dark-Energy Objects

Taking the higher density of the cocoon into consideration, the team showed that the misidentified black holes are producing more X-rays than previously thought, but the denser cocoon prevents most of these X-rays from escaping and reaching the Chandra telescope. This implies they are growing more quickly.

Previous groups did not apply the analysis technique adopted by Lambrides and her team, nor did they use the full set of data available for the CDF-S, giving them little information about the density of the cocoons.

A Uniform Glow

These results are important for theoretical models estimating the number of black holes in the universe and their growth rates, including those with different amounts of obscuration (in other words, how dense their cocoons are). Scientists design these models to explain a uniform glow in X-rays across the sky called the X-ray background, first discovered in the 1960s. Individual growing black holes observed in images like the CDF-S account for most of the X-ray background.

The X-ray background not currently resolved into individual sources is dominated by X-rays with energies above the threshold that Chandra can detect. Heavily obscured black holes are a natural explanation for this unresolved component because lower-energy X-rays are absorbed by the cocoon more than high-energy ones, and therefore are less detectable. The additional heavily obscured black holes reported here help reconcile past differences between the theoretical models and observations.

Slowly Coming into Focus

Its like the X-ray background is a blurry picture that has been slowly coming into focus for decades, said co-author Roberto Gilli from the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy. Our work has involved understanding the nature of the objects that have been some of the last to be resolved.

In addition to helping explain the X-ray background, these results are important for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. The masses of galaxies and their supermassive black holes are correlated with each other, meaning that the more massive the galaxy the more massive the black hole.

A paper reporting the results of this study is being published in The Astrophysical Journal. The other authors of the paper are Timothy Heckman of JHU; Fabio Vito from Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, in Santiago, Chile; and Colin Norman from JHU.

Source: A Large Population of Obscured AGN in Disguise as Low Luminosity AGN in Chandra Deep Field South, arxiv.org/abs/2002.00955

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Chandra X-Ray Center

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