Most of the biggest black holes in the universe have been eating cosmic meals behind closed doors – until now.
With its sharp infrared eyes, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope peered through walls of galactic dust to uncover what may be the long-sought missing population of hungry black holes known as quasars.
“From past studies using X-rays, we expected there were a lot of hidden quasars, but we couldn’t find them,” said Alejo Mart’nez-Sansigre of the University of Oxford, England. He is lead author of a paper about the research in this week’s Nature. “We had to wait for Spitzer to find an entire population of these dust-obscured objects.”
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