Supermassive Black Hole: Millions Discovered by NASA

NASA's recent Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has led to an abundance of new intergalactic discovery - including a copious amount of supermassive black holes and extreme, dust-obscured galaxies referred to as hot DOGs.

WISE's space-based infrared survey telescope completed two surveys of the sky in infrared in early 2011, and the results show the presence of millions of previously undetected supermassive black holes known as quasars. Approximately 1,000 hot DOGs (hot, dust-obscured galaxies) were also spotted and are now considered to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These DOGs can emit up to more than 100 trillion times as much light as planet Earth's sun, but since they are so dusty, however, they only appear in the longest wavelengths of infrared light captured by WISE.

A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole in a galaxy, on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses. A quasar is the region of space surrounding a supermassive black hole, where massive amount of energy are emitted. 

The WISE mission was like transporting a pair of night-vision goggles into space - its infrared telescope was able to see its way straight through obscuring material (like dust) that typically blocks visible light. As a result, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced its discovery of about 2.5 million new supermassive black hole candidates in what they refer to as a "bonanza" of quasars.

The Sacramento Bee reports that Hashima Hasan, a WISE program scientist at NASA's Headquarters in Washington, stated, "WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects 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."

These recent findings will give astronomers and scientists a better looking into the central workings of galaxies and supermassive black holes, and how both entities grow and evolve together.

"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.

Three separate WISE-based studies were conduct and will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. For more information on the WISE mission, click here.