[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="399" caption="Artist Impression of a Black Hole. Image credit: NASA"]
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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]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="399" caption="Artist Impression of a Black Hole. Image credit: NASA"]
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All of this I didn't know! Thanks for the well written post! One question - why is Chandra seeing black holes from 950 million years ago? How does that work?
ReplyDeleteLight takes time to travel. The distance light travels in one year is called a light year. When Chandra looks 950 million light years away, is looking 950 million years ago.
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