photo:Two teams of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Australia and Chile have discovered the first examples of isolated stellar-mass black holes adrift among the stars in our galaxy.
Date:21 March 2000
As if donning a pair of red-and-blue glasses to watch a 3-D image pop out from a flat piece of paper, astronomers from England and France recently used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to uncover a rare type of black hole hiding in a distant region of the universe.
Invisible to optical (visible-light) telescopes, a rare black hole known as a Type-2 quasar recently popped into view when some of its energy traveled some 6 billion light-years and hit the Chandra X-ray Observatory, currently in orbit around Earth. The find marks the first time astronomers have proof of the existence of a Type-2 quasar.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is proving to be a powerful new tool for astronomers studying quasars and black holes in deep space. "Chandra is the first telescope that can make sensitive measurements of [high-energy] X-rays," said Andrew Fabian, a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England.
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