A black hole bounty
The deepest X-ray image includes light from 12.5 billion lightyears away
The deepest ever X-ray image has been taken with NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. It is believed to show thousands of supermassive black holes.
The image required 11 and a half weeks of Chandra observing time to create, and captures the intense X-rays which are emitted by superheated dust falling into a black hole. It is thought that 70 per cent of the objects seen in the image could be black holes with masses ranging from 100,000 to 10 billion times the mass of the Sun.
“By staring long enough with Chandra, we can find and study large numbers of growing black holes, some of which appear not long after the Big Bang,” says team member Bin Luo of Nanjing University in China.