Scientists, using data from NASA telescopes, have spotted two supermassive black holes, located at the centres of galaxies close to our Milky Way, that were hidden behind shrouds of gas and dust until now.
Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. However, they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission can detect.
Both of the black holes are the central engines of what astronomers call “active galactic nuclei,” a class of extremely bright objects that includes quasars and blazars.
“These black holes are relatively close to the Milky Way, but they have remained hidden from us until now,” said Ady Annuar, graduate student at Durham University in the UK.
Depending on how these galactic nuclei are oriented and what sort of material surrounds them, they appear very different when examined with telescopes.