“With our new identifications we’ve 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).
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An enduring mystery is where the largest black holes in the universe come from –massive cosmic paradoxes where creation is destruction; that have no memory, yet are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe. An answer may exist about 10 million light-years from Earth, a faint, ghostly galaxy, galaxy NGC 404, named “Mirach’s Ghost” hidden in the line-of-sight glare of a giant red giant star some 200 light years distant.
“Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web,” says Vanderbilt’s Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and former astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about the location of absolute stillness in our solar system, the center of gravity with which to measure the gravitational waves that signal the existence of the invisible paradoxes we call black holes, which have no memory, and contain the earliest memories of the universe.
When the iconic black hole the size of our Solar System at the center of Galaxy M87 was imaged in 2019, astronomers described it as witnessing the “gates of Hell and the end of spacetime.” Fast forward to today, astronomers using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai’i describe the second-most distant quasar ever found –at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a black hole twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era– as Pōniuā`ena, which means “unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance” in the Hawaiian language. The light observed from Pōniuā`ena reached Earth 13 billion years after leaving the quasar just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
In a distant galaxy, two invisible merging black holes were nestled within a disk surrounding a much larger, invisible supermassive black hole 100 million time larger that the sun surrounded by a swarm of smaller black holes and stars exploded with light, generating gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime, that were captured as a flash of light four billions years later for the first time by astronomers at the NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019, in what might prove to be an iconic event called S190521g.
Stephen Hawking once wrote about black holes that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe. On August 14, 2019, scientists with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the Virgo detector in Italy, discovered of a mystery object of 2.6 solar masses as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, placing it in a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes.
