US space agency NASA discovers farthest “cloaked” black hole 12/08/2019 – Posted in: Daily News

NASA DISCOVERS FARTHEST “CLOAKED” BLACK HOLE

 

For: Mains

Topics covered: Black hole, Farthest ‘cloaked’ black hole, About new findings

 

News Flash

Astronomers from  NASA have discovered evidence for the farthest “cloaked” black hole found so far.

  • The discovery was made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
  • The astronomers have claimed the clocked black hole at only 6 percent of the current age of the universe.

 

This is the first indication of a black hole hidden by gas at such an early time in the history of the cosmos.  Supermassive black holes are often millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun and typically grow by pulling in material from a disk of surrounding matter.

 

The black hole is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or electromagnetic radiation can escape.

 

Highlights

  • Based on current theories, a dense cloud of gas feeds material into the disk surrounding a supermassive black hole during its period of early growth.
  • The rapid growth generates large amounts of radiation in a very small region around the black hole. Scientists call this extremely bright, compact source a “quasar.”
  • Scientists say it’s extremely difficult to find out quasars in the cloaked stage because so much of their radiation is absorbed and cannot be detected by current instruments.
  • The new finding came from observations of a quasar called PSO167-13, which was first discovered by Pan-STARRS, an optical-light telescope in Hawaii.
  • The team used  Chandra to observe PSO167-13 and found that only three X-ray light photons were detected from PSO167-13 after 16 hours of observation.
  • The team says low-energy X-rays are more easily absorbed than higher energy ones.
  • They believe that there has been a large and rapid increase in the cloaking of the quasar during the three years between when the optical and the X-ray observations were made.

 

Source: Indian Express

 

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