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[NASA] How Many Black Holes Are Hiding? NASA Study Homes in on Answer

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A thick torus of gas and dust surrounding a supermassive ****** hole is shown in this artist’s concept. The torus can obscure light that’s generated by material falling into the ****** hole. Observations by NASA telescopes have helped scientists identify more of these hidden ****** holes.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

An effort to find some of the biggest, most active ****** holes in the universe provides a better estimate for the ratio of hidden to unhidden behemoths.

Multiple NASA telescopes recently helped scientists search the sky for supermassive ****** holes — those up to billions of times heavier than the Sun. The new survey is unique because it was as likely to find massive ****** holes that are hidden behind thick clouds of gas and dust as those that are not.

Astronomers think that every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive ****** hole at its center. But testing this hypothesis is difficult because researchers can’t hope to count the billions or even trillions of supermassive ****** holes thought to exist in the universe. Instead they have to extrapolate from smaller samples to learn about the larger population. So accurately measuring the ratio of hidden supermassive ****** holes in a given sample helps scientists better estimate the total number of supermassive ****** holes in the universe.

The new study

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found that about 35% of supermassive ****** holes are heavily obscured, meaning the surrounding clouds of gas and dust are so thick they block even low-energy X-ray light. Comparable searches have previously found less than 15% of supermassive ****** holes are so obscured. Scientists think the true split should be closer to 50/50 based on models of how galaxies grow. If observations continue to indicate significantly less than half of supermassive ****** holes are hidden, scientists will need to adjust some key ideas they have about these objects and the role they play in shaping galaxies.

Hidden Treasure

Although ****** holes are inherently dark — not even light can escape their gravity — they can also be some of the brightest objects in the universe: When gas gets pulled into orbit around a supermassive ****** hole, like water circling a drain, the extreme gravity creates such intense friction and heat that the gas reaches hundreds of thousands of degrees and radiates so brightly it can outshine all the stars in the surrounding galaxy.

The clouds of gas and dust that surround and replenish the bright central disk may roughly take the shape of a torus, or doughnut. If the doughnut hole is facing toward Earth, the bright central disk within it is visible; if the doughnut is seen edge-on, the disk is obscured.

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A supermassive ****** hole surrounded by a torus of gas and dust is depicted in four different wavelengths of light in this artist’s concept. Visible light (top right) and low-energy X-rays (bottom left) are blocked by the torus; infrared (top left) is scattered and reemitted; and some high energy X-rays (bottom right) can penetrate the torus.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Most telescopes can rather easily identify face-on supermassive ****** holes, though not edge-on ones. But there’s an exception to this that the authors of the new paper took advantage of: The torus absorbs light from the central source and reemits lower-energy light in the infrared range (wavelengths slightly longer than what human eyes can detect). Essentially, the doughnuts glow in infrared.

These wavelengths of light were detected by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite, or

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, which operated for 10 months in 1983 and was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. A survey telescope that imaged the entire sky, IRAS was able to see the infrared emissions from the clouds surrounding supermassive ****** holes. Most importantly, it could spot edge-on and face-on ****** holes equally well.

IRAS caught hundreds of initial targets. Some of them turned out to be not heavily obscured ****** holes but galaxies with high rates of star formation that emit a similar infrared glow. So the authors of the new study used ground-based, visible-light telescopes to identify those galaxies and separate them from the hidden ****** holes.

To confirm edge-on, heavily obscured ****** holes, the researchers relied on NASA’s

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(Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array), an X-ray observatory also managed by JPL. X-rays are radiated by some of the hottest material around the ****** hole. Lower-energy X-rays are absorbed by the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, while the higher-energy X-rays observed by NuSTAR can penetrate and scatter off the clouds. Detecting these X-rays can take hours of observation, so scientists working with NuSTAR first need a telescope like IRAS to tell them where to look.

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NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray telescope, depicted in this artist’s concept, has helped astronomers get a better sense of how many supermassive ****** holes are hidden from view by thick clouds of gas and dust that surround them.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

“It amazes me how useful IRAS and NuSTAR were for this project, especially despite IRAS being operational over 40 years ago,” said study lead Peter Boorman, an astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “I think it shows the legacy value of telescope archives and the benefit of using multiple instruments and wavelengths of light together.”

Numerical Advantage

Determining the number of hidden ****** holes compared to nonhidden ones can help scientists understand how these ****** holes get so big. If they grow by consuming material, then a significant number of ****** holes should be surrounded by thick clouds and potentially obscured. Boorman and his coauthors say their study supports this hypothesis.

In addition, ****** holes influence the galaxies they live in, mostly by impacting how galaxies grow. This happens because ****** holes surrounded by massive clouds of gas and dust can consume vast — but not infinite — amounts of material. If too much falls toward a ****** hole at once, the ****** hole starts coughing up the excess and firing it back out into the galaxy. That can disperse gas clouds within the galaxy where stars are forming, slowing the rate of star formation there.

“If we didn’t have ****** holes, galaxies would be much larger,” said Poshak Gandhi, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and a coauthor on the new study. “So if we didn’t have a supermassive ****** hole in our Milky Way galaxy, there might be many more stars in the sky. That’s just one example of how ****** holes can influence a galaxy’s evolution.”

More About NuSTAR

A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information on NuSTAR, visit:

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News Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e*****@*****.tld

2025-002

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Last Updated
Jan 13, 2025

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