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Space Telescopes Reveal Secrets of Turbulent Black Hole
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By NASA
This artist’s illustration represents the results from a new study that examines the effects of X-ray and other high-energy radiation unleashed on potential exoplanets from Wolf 359, a nearby red dwarf star. Researchers used Chandra and XMM-Newton to study the impact of steady X-ray and energetic ultraviolet radiation from Wolf 359 on the atmospheres of planets that might be orbiting the star. They found that only a planet with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and at a relatively large distance away from Wolf 359 would have a chance to support life as we know it.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/S.Wolk, et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.Weiss; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk Planets around other stars need to be prepared for extreme weather conditions, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton that examined the effects of X-rays on potential planets around the most common type of stars.
Astronomers found that only a planet with greenhouse gases in its atmosphere like Earth and at a relatively large distance away from the star they studied would have a chance to support life as we know it around a nearby star.
Wolf 359 is a red dwarf with a mass about a tenth that of the Sun. Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the universe and live for billions of years, providing ample time for life to develop. At a distance of only 7.8 light-years away, Wolf 359 is also one of the closest stars to the solar system.
“Wolf 359 can help us unlock the secrets around stars and habitability,” said Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who led the study. “It’s so close and it belongs to such an important class of stars – it’s a great combination.”
Because red dwarfs are the most prevalent types of stars, astronomers have looked hard to find exoplanets around them. Astronomers have found some evidence for two planets in orbit around Wolf 359 using optical telescopes, but those conclusions have been challenged by other scientists.
“While we don’t have proof of planets around Wolf 359 yet, it seems very possible that it hosts multiple planets,” Wolk added. “This makes it an excellent test bed to look at what planets would experience around this kind of star.”
Wolk and his colleagues used Chandra and XMM to study the amounts of steady X-rays and extreme ultraviolet (UV) radiation – the most energetic type of UV radiation – that Wolf 359 would unleash on the possible planets around it.
They found that Wolf 359 is producing enough damaging radiation that only a planet with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in its atmosphere – and located at a relatively large distance from the star – would likely be able to sustain life.
“Just being far enough away from the star’s harmful radiation wouldn’t be enough to make it habitable,” said co-author Vinay Kashyap, also of CfA. “A planet around Wolf 359 would also need to be blanketed in greenhouse gases like Earth is.”
To study the effects of energetic radiation on the habitability of the planet candidates, the team considered the star’s habitable zone – the region around a star where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.
The outer limit of the habitable zone for Wolf 359 is about 15% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, because the red dwarf is much less bright than the Sun. Neither of the planet candidates for this system is located in Wolf 359’s habitable zone, with one too close to the star and the other too far out.
“If the inner planet is there, the X-ray and extreme UV radiation it is subjected to would destroy the atmosphere of this planet in only about a million years,” said co-author Ignazio Pillitteri of CfA and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Palermo, Italy.
The team also considered the effects of radiation on as-yet undetected planets within the habitable zone. They concluded that a planet like the Earth in the middle of the habitable zone should be able to sustain an atmosphere for almost two billion years, while one near the outer edge could last indefinitely, helped by the warming effects of greenhouse gases.
Another big danger for planets orbiting stars like Wolf 359 is from X-ray flares, or occasional bright bursts of X-rays, on top of the steady, everyday output from the star. Combining observations made with Chandra and XMM-Newton resulted in the discovery of 18 X-ray flares from Wolf 359 over 3.5 days.
Extrapolating from these observed flares, the team expects that much more powerful and damaging flares would occur over longer periods of time. The combined effects of the steady X-ray and UV radiation and the flares mean that any planet located in the habitable zone is unlikely to have a significant atmosphere long enough for multicellular life, as we know it on Earth, to form and survive. The exception is the habitable zone’s outer edge if the planet has a significant greenhouse effect.
These results were presented at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, and are being prepared for publication in a journal. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
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By NASA
NASA’s Roman Coronagraph Instrument will greatly advance our ability to directly image exoplanets, or planets and disks around other stars.
The Roman Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstration designed and built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will fly aboard NASA’s next flagship astrophysics observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Coronagraphs work by blocking light from a bright object, like a star, so that the observer can more easily see a nearby faint object, like a planet. The Roman Coronagraph Instrument will use a unique suite of technologies including deformable mirrors, masks, high-precision cameras, and active wavefront sensing and control to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, or 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star.
Artwork Key
1. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
2. Exoplanet Count : Total number of exoplanets discovered at the time of poster release. This number is increasing all of the time.
3. Nancy Grace Roman’s birth year : Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925.
4. Color Filters : Filters block different wavelengths, or colors, of light.
5. Exoplanet Camera
6. Deformable Mirrors : Adjusts the wavefront of incoming light by changing the shape of a mirror with thousands of tiny pistons.
7. Focal Plane Mask : This is a mask that helps to block starlight and reveal exoplanets.
8. Lyot Stop Mask : This is a mask that helps to block starlight and reveal exoplanets.
9. Fast Steering Mirror : This element corrects for telescope pointing jitter.
10. Additional Coronagraph Masks : These masks block most of the glare from stars to reveal faint orbiting planets and dusty debris disks.
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By NASA
Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read Newfound Galaxy Class May Indicate Early Black Hole Growth, Webb Finds
A team of astronomers sifted through James Webb Space Telescope data from multiple surveys to compile one of the largest samples of “little red dots” to date. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College). In December 2022, less than six months after commencing science operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope revealed something never seen before: numerous red objects that appear small on the sky, which scientists soon called “little red dots” (LRDs). Though these dots are quite abundant, researchers are perplexed by their nature, the reason for their unique colors, and what they convey about the early universe.
A team of astronomers recently compiled one of the largest samples of LRDs to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the big bang. They found that a large fraction of the LRDs in their sample showed signs of containing growing supermassive black holes.
“We’re confounded by this new population of objects that Webb has found. We don’t see analogs of them at lower redshifts, which is why we haven’t seen them prior to Webb,” said Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and lead author of the study. “There’s a substantial amount of work being done to try to determine the nature of these little red dots and whether their light is dominated by accreting black holes.”
Image A: Little Red Dots (NIRCam Image)
A team of astronomers sifted through James Webb Space Telescope data from multiple surveys to compile one of the largest samples of “little red dots” to date. From their sample, they found that these mysterious red objects that appear small on the sky emerge in large numbers around 600 million years after the big bang and undergo a rapid decline in quantity around 1.5 billion years after the big bang. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College). A Potential Peek Into Early Black Hole Growth
A significant contributing factor to the team’s large sample size of LRDs was their use of publicly available Webb data. To start, the team searched for these red sources in the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey before widening their scope to other extragalactic legacy fields, including the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) and the Next Generation Deep Extragalactic Exploratory Public (NGDEEP) survey.
The methodology used to identify these objects also differed from previous studies, resulting in the census spanning a wide redshift range. The distribution they discovered is intriguing: LRDs emerge in large numbers around 600 million years after the big bang and undergo a rapid decline in quantity around 1.5 billion years after the big bang.
The team looked toward the Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey (RUBIES) for spectroscopic data on some of the LRDs in their sample. They found that about 70 percent of the targets showed evidence for gas rapidly orbiting 2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second) – a sign of an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. This suggests that many LRDs are accreting black holes, also known as active galactic nuclei (AGN).
“The most exciting thing for me is the redshift distributions. These really red, high-redshift sources basically stop existing at a certain point after the big bang,” said Steven Finkelstein, a co-author of the study at the University of Texas at Austin. “If they are growing black holes, and we think at least 70 percent of them are, this hints at an era of obscured black hole growth in the early universe.”
Contrary to Headlines, Cosmology Isn’t Broken
When LRDs were first discovered, some suggested that cosmology was “broken.” If all of the light coming from these objects was from stars, it implied that some galaxies had grown so big, so fast, that theories could not account for them.
The team’s research supports the argument that much of the light coming from these objects is from accreting black holes and not from stars. Fewer stars means smaller, more lightweight galaxies that can be understood by existing theories.
“This is how you solve the universe-breaking problem,” said Anthony Taylor, a co-author of the study at the University of Texas at Austin.
Curiouser and Curiouser
There is still a lot up for debate as LRDs seem to evoke even more questions. For example, it is still an open question as to why LRDs do not appear at lower redshifts. One possible answer is inside-out growth: As star formation within a galaxy expands outward from the nucleus, less gas is being deposited by supernovas near the accreting black hole, and it becomes less obscured. In this case, the black hole sheds its gas cocoon, becomes bluer and less red, and loses its LRD status.
Additionally, LRDs are not bright in X-ray light, which contrasts with most black holes at lower redshifts. However, astronomers know that at certain gas densities, X-ray photons can become trapped, reducing the amount of X-ray emission. Therefore, this quality of LRDs could support the theory that these are heavily obscured black holes.
The team is taking multiple approaches to understand the nature of LRDs, including examining the mid-infrared properties of their sample, and looking broadly for accreting black holes to see how many fit LRD criteria. Obtaining deeper spectroscopy and select follow-up observations will also be beneficial for solving this currently “open case” about LRDs.
“There’s always two or more potential ways to explain the confounding properties of little red dots,” said Kocevski. “It’s a continuous exchange between models and observations, finding a balance between what aligns well between the two and what conflicts.”
These results were presented in a press conference at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, and have been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Science – Dale Kocevski (Colby College)
Related Information
3D visualization: CEERS Fly Through visualization and JADES GOODS South Fly Through visualization
Graphic: What is cosmological redshift?
Graphic: Dissecting Supermassive Black Holes
Article: Webb Science: Galaxies Through Time
Web Page: Learn more about black holes
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Last Updated Jan 14, 2025 Editor Stephen Sabia Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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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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Last Updated Jan 13, 2025 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton has detected rapidly fluctuating X-rays coming from the very edge of a supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy. The results paint a fascinating picture that defies how we thought matter falls into such black holes, and points to a potential source of gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission, LISA, could see.
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