NASA’s NuSTAR telescope captures first glimpses of two mysterious black holes in galaxy 7 million light years away
The two black holes are not supermassive black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, but they are still ten times more luminous than the normal stellar-mass black holes that pepper the space between the stars. - NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), has captured an image of two black holes in the spiral galaxy IC342 (also known as Caldwell 5). “These new images showcase why NuSTAR is giving us an unprecedented look at the cosmos,” said Lou Kaluzienski, NuSTAR program scientist in a release. “With NuSTAR’s greater sensitivity and imaging capability, we’re getting a wealth of new information on a wide array of cosmic phenomena in the high-energy X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The NuSTAR is the first telescope in orbit that can focus on high-energy X-Ray emissions, which allows it to get a much clearer picture of distant stellar phenomena. Galaxy IC342 is 7 million light-years away from Earth. “High-energy X-rays hold a key to unlocking the mystery surrounding these objects,” Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement. “Whether they are massive black holes, or there is new physics in how they feed, the answer is going to be fascinating.” In the NuSTAR image (above), the two points of purple indicate the presence of black holes. The purple indicates X-rays while the rest of the image is represents visible light. “Before NuSTAR, high-energy X-ray pictures of this galaxy and the two black holes would be so fuzzy that everything would appear as one pixel,” said Harrison.