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By NASA
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander getting encapsulated in SpaceX’s rocket fairing ahead of the planned liftoff for 1:11 a.m. EST Jan. 15 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in FloridaSpaceX As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, the agency is preparing to fly ten instruments aboard Firefly Aerospace’s first delivery to the Moon. These science payloads and technology demonstrations will help advance our understanding of the Moon and planetary processes, while paving the way for future crewed missions on the Moon and beyond, for the benefit of all.
Firefly’s lunar lander, named Blue Ghost, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, Jan.15, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a 45-day cruise phase, Blue Ghost is targeted to land near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a basin approximately 340 miles wide (550 kilometers) located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side.
How can we enable more precise navigation on the Moon? How do spacecraft interact with the lunar surface? How does Earth’s magnetic field influence the effects of space weather on our home planet? NASA’s instruments on this flight will conduct first-of-their-kind demonstrations to help answer these questions and more, including testing regolith sampling technologies, lunar subsurface drilling capabilities, increasing precision of positioning and navigation abilities, testing radiation tolerant computing, and learning how to mitigate lunar dust during lunar landings.
The ten NASA payloads aboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander include:
Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) will measure heat flow from the Moon’s interior by measuring the thermal gradient, or changes in temperature at various depths, and thermal conductivity, or the subsurface material’s ability to let heat pass through it. LISTER will take several measurements up to 10 feet deep using pneumatic drilling technology with a custom heat flow needle instrument at its tip. Data from LISTER will help scientists retrace the Moon’s thermal history and understand how it formed and cooled. Lead organization: Texas Tech University
Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) is designed to collect regolith samples from the lunar surface using a burst of compressed gas to drive the regolith into a sample chamber (sieving) for collection and analysis by various instruments. Additional instrumentation will then transmit the results back to Earth. The LPV payload is designed to help increase the science return from planetary missions by testing low-cost technologies for collecting regolith samples in-situ. Lead organization: Honeybee Robotics
Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR) serves as a target for lasers on Earth to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the Moon by reflecting very short laser pulses from Earth-based Lunar Laser Ranging Observatories. The laser pulse transit time to the Moon and back is used to determine the distance. Data from NGLR could improve the accuracy of our lunar coordinate system and contribute to our understanding of the inner structure of the Moon and fundamental physics questions. Lead organization: University of Maryland
Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) will determine how lunar regolith sticks to a range of materials exposed to the Moon’s environment throughout the lunar day. RAC will measure accumulation rates of lunar regolith on surfaces (for example, solar cells, optical systems, coatings, and sensors) through imaging to determine their ability to repel or shed lunar dust. The data captured will help test, improve, and protect spacecraft, spacesuits, and habitats from abrasive regolith. Lead organization: Aegis Aerospace
Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) will demonstrate a computer that can recover from faults caused by ionizing radiation. Several RadPC prototypes have been tested aboard the International Space Station and Earth-orbiting satellites, but this flight will provide the biggest trial yet by demonstrating the computer’s ability to withstand space radiation as it passes through Earth’s radiation belts, while in transit to the Moon, and on the lunar surface. Lead organization: Montana State University
Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) is an active dust mitigation technology that uses electric fields to move and prevent hazardous lunar dust accumulation on surfaces. EDS is designed to lift, transport, and remove particles from surfaces with no moving parts. Multiple tests will demonstrate the feasibility of the self-cleaning glasses and thermal radiator surfaces on the Moon. In the event the surfaces do not receive dust during landing, EDS has the capability to re-dust itself using the same technology. Lead organization: NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) will capture a series of X-ray images to study the interaction of solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field that drives geomagnetic disturbances and storms. Deployed and operated on the lunar surface, this instrument will provide the first global images showing the edge of Earth’s magnetic field for critical insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces surrounding our planet impact Earth. Lead organizations: Boston University, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Johns Hopkins University
Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) will characterize the structure and composition of the Moon’s mantle by measuring electric and magnetic fields. This investigation will help determine the Moon’s temperature structure and thermal evolution to understand how the Moon has cooled and chemically differentiated since it formed. Lead organization: Southwest Research Institute
Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) will demonstrate the possibility of acquiring and tracking signals from GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) constellations, specifically GPS and Galileo, during transit to the Moon, during lunar orbit, and on the lunar surface. If successful, LuGRE will be the first pathfinder for future lunar spacecraft to use existing Earth-based navigation constellations to autonomously and accurately estimate their position, velocity, and time. Lead organizations: NASA Goddard, Italian Space Agency
Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) will use stereo imaging photogrammetry to capture the impact of the rocket exhaust plume on lunar regolith as the lander descends on the Moon’s surface. The high-resolution stereo images will aid in creating models to predict lunar regolith erosion, which is an important task as bigger, heavier spacecraft and hardware are delivered to the Moon in close proximity to each other. This instrument also flew on Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS delivery. Lead organization: NASA’s Langley Research Center
Through the CLPS initiative, NASA purchases lunar landing and surface operations services from American companies. The agency uses CLPS to send scientific instruments and technology demonstrations to advance capabilities for science, exploration, or commercial development of the Moon. By supporting a robust cadence of lunar deliveries, NASA will continue to enable a growing lunar economy while leveraging the entrepreneurial innovation of the commercial space industry.
Learn more about CLPS and Artemis at: http://www.nasa.gov/clps
Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov
Natalia Riusech / Nilufar Ramji
Johnson Space Center, Houston
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By NASA
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy gives keynote remarks during the 37th Space Symposium, Tuesday, April 5, 2022, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) The Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation has selected NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, a retired United States Air Force colonel and former NASA astronaut, to receive the 2025 National Space Trophy on April 25 in Houston.
“This honor is not just a reflection of my journey but a testament to the incredible teams and visionaries I’ve been privileged to work alongside,” said Melroy. “Exploring space is the ultimate act of human aspiration, proving time and again that when we dream together, we achieve the impossible. Being selected for the National Space Trophy is a humbling reminder of how far we’ve come — and how much further we can go.”
Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who nominated Melroy alongside former NASA Johnson director Michael Coats, said, “Pam has brilliantly paved the way for future generations pursuing careers in STEM fields through her exemplary leadership, dedication to mission excellence, and integral contributions to the advancement of space exploration. I am thrilled and immensely proud that Pam is receiving this well-deserved recognition.”
Sworn in as NASA’s deputy administrator on June 21, 2021, Melroy assists NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on key agency decisions, defines the agency’s strategic vision, and represents NASA to key government and international partners.
Melroy first joined NASA as an astronaut in 1994 and holds the distinction of being only one of two women to command a space shuttle. She spent more than 38 days in space across three space shuttle missions, all contributing to the assembly of the International Space Station. She served as pilot for STS-92 in 2000 and STS-112 in 2002, and she commanded STS-120 in 2007.
After serving more than two decades in the U.S. Air Force and as a NASA astronaut, Melroy transitioned to leadership roles at Lockheed Martin, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Nova Systems Pty, Australia. Additionally, she was as an advisor to the Australian Space Agency and a member of the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group.
The Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation invites members of the public and the aerospace community to attend the Space Awards gala where Melroy will be recognized with the National Space Trophy. For more information on Melroy, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/people/nasa-deputy-administrator-pam-melroy/
-end-
Amber Jacobson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
amber.c.jacobson@nasa.gov
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By NASA
Astronomers have released a set of more than a million simulated images showcasing the cosmos as NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see it. This preview will help scientists explore a myriad of Roman’s science goals.
“We used a supercomputer to create a synthetic universe and simulated billions of years of evolution, tracing every photon’s path all the way from each cosmic object to Roman’s detectors,” said Michael Troxel, an associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the simulation campaign. “This is the largest, deepest, most realistic synthetic survey of a mock universe available today.”
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This video begins with a tiny one-square-degree portion of the full OpenUniverse simulation area (about 70 square degrees, equivalent to an area of sky covered by more than 300 full moons). It spirals in toward a particularly galaxy-dense region, zooming by a factor of 75. This simulation showcases the cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could see it, allowing scientists to preview the next generation of cosmic discovery now. Roman’s real future surveys will enable a deep dive into the universe with highly resolved imaging, as demonstrated in this video. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel The project, called OpenUniverse, relied on the now-retired Theta supercomputer at the DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The supercomputer accomplished a process that would take over 6,000 years on a typical computer in just nine days.
In addition to Roman, the 400-terabyte dataset will also preview observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, and approximate simulations from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Euclid mission, which has NASA contributions. The Roman data is available now here, and the Rubin and Euclid data will soon follow.
The team used the most sophisticated modeling of the universe’s underlying physics available and fed in information from existing galaxy catalogs and the performance of the telescopes’ instruments. The resulting simulated images span 70 square degrees, equivalent to an area of sky covered by more than 300 full moons. In addition to covering a broad area, it also covers a large span of time — more than 12 billion years.
Each tiny dot in the image at left is a galaxy simulated by the OpenUniverse campaign. The one-square-degree image offers a small window into the full simulation area, which is about 70 square degrees (equivalent to an area of sky covered by more than 300 full moons), while the inset at right is a close-up of an area 75 times smaller (1/600th the size of the full area). This simulation showcases the cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could see it. Roman will expand on the largest space-based galaxy survey like it – the Hubble Space Telescope’s COSMOS survey – which imaged two square degrees of sky over the course of 42 days. In only 250 days, Roman will view more than a thousand times more of the sky with the same resolution. The project’s immense space-time coverage shows scientists how the telescopes will help them explore some of the biggest cosmic mysteries. They will be able to study how dark energy (the mysterious force thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion) and dark matter (invisible matter, seen only through its gravitational influence on regular matter) shape the cosmos and affect its fate. Scientists will get closer to understanding dark matter by studying its gravitational effects on visible matter. And by studying the simulation’s 100 million synthetic galaxies, they will see how galaxies and galaxy clusters evolved over eons.
Repeated mock observations of a particular slice of the universe enabled the team to stitch together movies that unveil exploding stars crackling across the synthetic cosmos like fireworks. These starbursts allow scientists to map the expansion of the simulated universe.
This simulation showcases the dynamic universe as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could see it over the course of its five-year primary mission. The video sparkles with synthetic supernovae from observations of the OpenUniverse simulated universe taken every five days (similar to the expected cadence of Roman’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, which OpenUniverse simulates in its entirety). On top of the static sky of stars in the Milky Way and other galaxies, more than a million exploding stars flare into visibility and then slowly fade away. To highlight the dynamic physics happening and for visibility at this scale, the true brightness of each transient event has been magnified by a factor of 10,000 and no background light has been added to the simulated images. The video begins with Roman’s full field of view, which represents a single pointing of Roman’s camera, and then zooms into one square.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel Scientists are now using OpenUniverse data as a testbed for creating an alert system to notify astronomers when Roman sees such phenomena. The system will flag these events and track the light they generate so astronomers can study them.
That’s critical because Roman will send back far too much data for scientists to comb through themselves. Teams are developing machine-learning algorithms to determine how best to filter through all the data to find and differentiate cosmic phenomena, like various types of exploding stars.
“Most of the difficulty is in figuring out whether what you saw was a special type of supernova that we can use to map how the universe is expanding, or something that is almost identical but useless for that goal,” said Alina Kiessling, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and the principal investigator of OpenUniverse.
While Euclid is already actively scanning the cosmos, Rubin is set to begin operations late this year and Roman will launch by May 2027. Scientists can use the synthetic images to plan the upcoming telescopes’ observations and prepare to handle their data. This prep time is crucial because of the flood of data these telescopes will provide.
In terms of data volume, “Roman is going to blow away everything that’s been done from space in infrared and optical wavelengths before,” Troxel said. “For one of Roman’s surveys, it will take less than a year to do observations that would take the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes around a thousand years. The sheer number of objects Roman will sharply image will be transformative.”
This synthetic OpenUniverse animation shows the type of science that astronomers will be able to do with future Roman deep-field observations. The gravity of intervening galaxy clusters and dark matter can lens the light from farther objects, warping their appearance as shown in the animation. By studying the distorted light, astronomers can study elusive dark matter, which can only be measured indirectly through its gravitational effects on visible matter. As a bonus, this lensing also makes it easier to see the most distant galaxies whose light the dark matter magnifies. Caltech-IPAC/R. Hurt “We can expect an incredible array of exciting, potentially Nobel Prize-winning science to stem from Roman’s observations,” Kiessling said. “The mission will do things like unveil how the universe expanded over time, make 3D maps of galaxies and galaxy clusters, reveal new details about star formation and evolution — all things we simulated. So now we get to practice on the synthetic data so we can get right to the science when real observations begin.”
Astronomers will continue using the simulations after Roman launches for a cosmic game of spot the differences. Comparing real observations with synthetic ones will help scientists see how accurately their simulation predicts reality. Any discrepancies could hint at different physics at play in the universe than expected.
“If we see something that doesn’t quite agree with the standard model of cosmology, it will be extremely important to confirm that we’re really seeing new physics and not just misunderstanding something in the data,” said Katrin Heitmann, a cosmologist and deputy director of Argonne’s High Energy Physics division who managed the project’s supercomputer time. “Simulations are super useful for figuring that out.”
OpenUniverse, along with other simulation tools being developed by Roman’s Science Operations and Science Support centers, will prepare astronomers for the large datasets expected from Roman. The project brings together dozens of experts from NASA’s JPL, DOE’s Argonne, IPAC, and several U.S. universities to coordinate with the Roman Project Infrastructure Teams, SLAC, and the Rubin LSST DESC (Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration). The Theta supercomputer was operated by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jan 14, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Astrophysics Dark Energy Dark Matter Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Galaxy clusters Goddard Space Flight Center High-Tech Computing Science & Research Stars Supernovae Technology The Universe Explore More
6 min read How NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Illuminate Cosmic Dawn
Article 6 months ago 6 min read Why NASA’s Roman Mission Will Study Milky Way’s Flickering Lights
Article 1 year ago 7 min read Simulated Image Shows How NASA’s Roman Could Expand on Hubble’s Deepest View
Article 3 years ago View the full article
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More 35th Anniversary 4 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Tracks Down a ‘Blue Lurker’ Among Stars
Evolution of a “Blue Lurker” Star in a Triple System Credits:
NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) The name “blue lurker” might sound like a villainous character from a superhero movie. But it is a rare class of star that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope explored by looking deeply into the open star cluster M67, roughly 2,800 light-years away.
Forensics with Hubble data show that the star has had a tumultuous life, mixing with two other stars gravitationally bound together in a remarkable triple-star system. The star has a kinship to so-called “blue stragglers,” which are hotter, brighter, and bluer than expected because they are likely the result of mergers between stars.
Evolution of a “Blue Lurker” Star in a Triple System Panel 1: A triple star system containing three Sun-like stars. Two are very tightly orbiting. The third star has a much wider orbit. Panel 2: The close stellar pair spiral together and merge to form one more massive star. Panel 3: The merged star evolves into a giant star. As the huge photosphere expands, some of the material falls onto the outer companion, causing the companion to grow larger and its rotation rate to increase. Panels 4-5: The central merged star eventually burns out and forms a massive white dwarf, and the outer companion spirals in towards the white dwarf, leaving a binary star system with a tighter orbit. Panel 6: The surviving outer companion is much like our Sun but nicknamed a “blue lurker.” Although it is slightly brighter bluer than expected because of the earlier mass-transfer from the central star and is now rotating very rapidly, these features are subtle. The star could easily be mistaken for a normal Sun-like star despite its exotic evolutionary history. NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) The blue lurker is spinning much faster than expected, an unusual behavior that led to its identification. Otherwise it looks like a normal Sun-like star. The term “blue” is a bit of a misnomer because the star’s color blends in with all the other solar-mass stars in the cluster. Hence it is sort of “lurking” among the common stellar population.
The spin rate is evidence that the lurker must have siphoned in material from a companion star, causing its rotation to speed up. The star’s high spin rate was discovered with NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope. While normal Sun-like stars typically take about 30 days to complete one rotation, the lurker takes only four days.
How the blue lurker got that way is a “super complicated evolutionary story,” said Emily Leiner of Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. “This star is really exciting because it’s an example of a star that has interacted in a triple-star system.” The blue lurker originally rotated more slowly and orbited a binary system consisting of two Sun-like stars.
Around 500 million years ago, the two stars in that binary merged, creating a single, much more massive star. This behemoth soon swelled into a giant star, dumping some of its own material onto the blue lurker and spinning it up in the process. Today, we observe that the blue lurker is orbiting a white dwarf star — the burned out remains of the massive merger.
“We know these multiple star systems are fairly common and are going to lead to really interesting outcomes,” Leiner explained. “We just don’t yet have a model that can reliably connect through all of those stages of evolution. Triple-star systems are about 10 percent of the Sun-like star population. But being able to put together this evolutionary history is challenging.”
Hubble observed the white dwarf companion star that the lurker orbits. Using ultraviolet spectroscopy, Hubble found the white dwarf is very hot (as high as 23,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or roughly three times the Sun’s surface temperature) and a heavyweight at 0.72 solar masses. According to theory, hot white dwarfs in M67 should be only about 0.5 solar masses. This is evidence that the white dwarf is the byproduct of the merger of two stars that once were part of a triple-star system.
“This is one of the only triple systems where we can tell a story this detailed about how it evolved,” said Leiner. “Triples are emerging as potentially very important to creating interesting, explosive end products. It’s really unusual to be able to put constraints on such a system as we are exploring.”
Leiner’s results are being presented at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
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Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
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A thick torus of gas and dust surrounding a supermassive black hole is shown in this artist’s concept. The torus can obscure light that’s generated by material falling into the black hole. Observations by NASA telescopes have helped scientists identify more of these hidden black holes.NASA/JPL-Caltech An effort to find some of the biggest, most active black holes in the universe provides a better estimate for the ratio of hidden to unhidden behemoths.
Multiple NASA telescopes recently helped scientists search the sky for supermassive black holes — those up to billions of times heavier than the Sun. The new survey is unique because it was as likely to find massive black holes that are hidden behind thick clouds of gas and dust as those that are not.
Astronomers think that every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its center. But testing this hypothesis is difficult because researchers can’t hope to count the billions or even trillions of supermassive black holes thought to exist in the universe. Instead they have to extrapolate from smaller samples to learn about the larger population. So accurately measuring the ratio of hidden supermassive black holes in a given sample helps scientists better estimate the total number of supermassive black holes in the universe.
The new study published in the Astrophysical Journal found that about 35% of supermassive black holes are heavily obscured, meaning the surrounding clouds of gas and dust are so thick they block even low-energy X-ray light. Comparable searches have previously found less than 15% of supermassive black holes are so obscured. Scientists think the true split should be closer to 50/50 based on models of how galaxies grow. If observations continue to indicate significantly less than half of supermassive black holes are hidden, scientists will need to adjust some key ideas they have about these objects and the role they play in shaping galaxies.
Hidden Treasure
Although black holes are inherently dark — not even light can escape their gravity — they can also be some of the brightest objects in the universe: When gas gets pulled into orbit around a supermassive black hole, like water circling a drain, the extreme gravity creates such intense friction and heat that the gas reaches hundreds of thousands of degrees and radiates so brightly it can outshine all the stars in the surrounding galaxy.
The clouds of gas and dust that surround and replenish the bright central disk may roughly take the shape of a torus, or doughnut. If the doughnut hole is facing toward Earth, the bright central disk within it is visible; if the doughnut is seen edge-on, the disk is obscured.
A supermassive black hole surrounded by a torus of gas and dust is depicted in four different wavelengths of light in this artist’s concept. Visible light (top right) and low-energy X-rays (bottom left) are blocked by the torus; infrared (top left) is scattered and reemitted; and some high energy X-rays (bottom right) can penetrate the torus. NASA/JPL-Caltech Most telescopes can rather easily identify face-on supermassive black holes, though not edge-on ones. But there’s an exception to this that the authors of the new paper took advantage of: The torus absorbs light from the central source and reemits lower-energy light in the infrared range (wavelengths slightly longer than what human eyes can detect). Essentially, the doughnuts glow in infrared.
These wavelengths of light were detected by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite, or IRAS, which operated for 10 months in 1983 and was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. A survey telescope that imaged the entire sky, IRAS was able to see the infrared emissions from the clouds surrounding supermassive black holes. Most importantly, it could spot edge-on and face-on black holes equally well.
IRAS caught hundreds of initial targets. Some of them turned out to be not heavily obscured black holes but galaxies with high rates of star formation that emit a similar infrared glow. So the authors of the new study used ground-based, visible-light telescopes to identify those galaxies and separate them from the hidden black holes.
To confirm edge-on, heavily obscured black holes, the researchers relied on NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array), an X-ray observatory also managed by JPL. X-rays are radiated by some of the hottest material around the black hole. Lower-energy X-rays are absorbed by the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, while the higher-energy X-rays observed by NuSTAR can penetrate and scatter off the clouds. Detecting these X-rays can take hours of observation, so scientists working with NuSTAR first need a telescope like IRAS to tell them where to look.
NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray telescope, depicted in this artist’s concept, has helped astronomers get a better sense of how many supermassive black holes are hidden from view by thick clouds of gas and dust that surround them.NASA/JPL-Caltech “It amazes me how useful IRAS and NuSTAR were for this project, especially despite IRAS being operational over 40 years ago,” said study lead Peter Boorman, an astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “I think it shows the legacy value of telescope archives and the benefit of using multiple instruments and wavelengths of light together.”
Numerical Advantage
Determining the number of hidden black holes compared to nonhidden ones can help scientists understand how these black holes get so big. If they grow by consuming material, then a significant number of black holes should be surrounded by thick clouds and potentially obscured. Boorman and his coauthors say their study supports this hypothesis.
In addition, black holes influence the galaxies they live in, mostly by impacting how galaxies grow. This happens because black holes surrounded by massive clouds of gas and dust can consume vast — but not infinite — amounts of material. If too much falls toward a black hole at once, the black hole starts coughing up the excess and firing it back out into the galaxy. That can disperse gas clouds within the galaxy where stars are forming, slowing the rate of star formation there.
“If we didn’t have black holes, galaxies would be much larger,” said Poshak Gandhi, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and a coauthor on the new study. “So if we didn’t have a supermassive black hole in our Milky Way galaxy, there might be many more stars in the sky. That’s just one example of how black holes can influence a galaxy’s evolution.”
More About NuSTAR
A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information on NuSTAR, visit:
www.nustar.caltech.edu
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Last Updated Jan 13, 2025 Related Terms
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