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Friday, June 17, 2011

Giganto Black Holes

In case you don't know, black holes are bodies of infinite gravity from which nothing can escape, not even light! One telescope that can study these objects is the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It recently found some very large black holes in the southern sky similar to ones found in the early universe. Since Chandra looked at the same part of the sky for six weeks, it could see black holes from up to 950 million years ago! These baby black holes are a little less powerful than quasars; very bright black holes that throw of energy due to gas and dust falling in to them.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="399" caption="Artist Impression of a Black Hole. Image credit: NASA"][/caption]