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As they capture matter from their surroundings, the black holes produce sounds that travel across the Universe. Scientists already detected the streams of X-rays coming from space, but only now they start to discover their source.
The Black Holes Hunt
The instrument used to identify the black holes emitting sounds is the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array from NASA.
Scientists believed that the cosmic choir was either the creation of small individuals or was being produced by a few mega-objects with very powerful voices.
The gravity pulls in dust and gas from its vicinity, and while the materials reach the speed of light a powerful burst of X-ray is sent through space. The astronomers called it the cosmic-ray background.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory succeeded in identifying many of the objects creating the space melody, but the loudest voices continued to remain a mystery.
The powerful NuSTAR helped the scientists to detect up to 35% of the gravity anomalies creating the sounds. Even the most hidden black holes can now be spotted by the researchers.
The Questions
The current theory is that each of the galaxies has supermassive black holes at their core. Even the Milky Way should have one in its center, but the researchers believe that our black hole becomes quiet after feeding off an extraordinary amount of matter which let it have a mass 4.5 million times larger than the Sun.
The analysis of the sounds, correlated with the information obtained by the NuSTAR, will help scientists understand the feeding pattern of the black holes and how it changes over time. The researchers want to know how and when the gravity anomalies are created and stop to exist.
Another question that up until now had no answers is what would be the distribution of dust and gas surrounding the black hole. The matter is used both to feed and to hide the gravity anomaly, and the researchers want to find out what is the relation between the accumulation of matter and the existence of the black hole.
The instrument will be the first telescope able to identify the location of a black hole based on its X-ray songs. NuSTAR started to function in 2012, and since then it found a lot of space objects connected to the cosmic sounds.
The X-rays can travel through dust and gas and reach further into space and closer to the Earth, which makes the black holes to be easier to detect.
Image Source: Wikipedia
