WISE Throws Light on Millions of Black Holes

Millions of supermassive black holes and a new type of galaxy have been uncovered by NASA's Wide Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

NASA's WISE examined the whole sky twice in infrared light and completed its survey in 2011. The images provided by the telescope revealed that millions of dusty black hole exists across the universe and about 1000 dustier objects are claimed to be one of the brightest galaxies ever known and is nicknamed hot DOGs.

"WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We've found an asteroid dancing ahead of Earth in its orbit, the coldest star-like orbs known and now, supermassive black holes and galaxies hiding behind cloaks of dust."

The data revealed by the telescope are helping the astronomers to initiate further new discoveries. These images are helping astronomers better understand the galaxies and how the black holes grow and evolve together. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut down star formation in galaxies.

Astronomers used WISE in one study to capture 2.5 million actively feeding super massive black holes located 10 billion light years away, but due to dust blocks nearly two third objects were never detected. But WISE easily detects them because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light.

"We've got the black holes cornered," said Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of the WISE black hole study and project scientist for another NASA black-hole mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). "WISE is finding them across the full sky, while NuSTAR is giving us an entirely new look at their high-energy X-ray light and learning what makes them tick."

Two other WISE papers report finding brightest galaxies known, one of the main goals of the mission. Till date they have identified 1,000 candidates.

And these extreme objects have the capacity to expel nearly 100 trillion times as much as light as our sun. Due to their dusty nature they appear only in the longest wavelength of infrared light captured by WISE. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope declared that within these DOGs there are new stars being formed.

"These dusty, cataclysmically forming galaxies are so rare WISE had to scan the entire sky to find them," said Peter Eisenhardt, lead author of the paper on the first of these bright, dusty galaxies, and project scientist for WISE at JPL. "We are also seeing evidence that these record setters may have formed their black holes before the bulk of their stars. The 'eggs' may have come before the 'chickens.'"

With the help of W.M Keck Observatory as well as Gemini Observatory, Palomar's 200-inch Hale telescope, the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory more than 100 objects have been confirmed that is located 10 billion light years away.

Combined data of WISE observation and Caltech's Submillimeter Observatory revealed that these extreme galaxies are more than twice as hot as other infrared-bright galaxies.

"We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies," said Jingwen Wu of JPL, lead author of the study on the submillimeter observations.