I think black holes are fascinating; spooky, mysterious, and difficult to understand, sure, but fascinating nonetheless.  With the new work NASA/ESA is doing in combining Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, it seems they can see “hidden”, or “missing” black holes.

Missing?  We lost them?

No, not exactly.  A “missing” black hole is just a black hole that powered the earliest active galaxies.  These have been implied by earlier images, but because they’re so very distant ( some are up to 13 billion ly away) they are hard to image.  And how does one “image” a black hole, anyway?  Ah, you know the answer to that one, don’t you?  It wouldn’t even make an interesting riddle question.  Hawking Radiation… the energy emitted by matter as it falls into a black hole, which is capable of escaping the pull of the black hole.

What’s interesting in the images above is that you’re seeing the Hawking Radiation, meaning there’s a black hole there, but you’re not seeing a galaxy around the black hole.  There are seven known sources of Hawking Radiation that we’ve found so far that seem to be missing a galaxy.

There is some speculation that in looking at these black holes, we are looking at the remnants of the first galaxies formed after the big bang.

Interested?  Read a little more about it here, at the HubbleSite news center.