Black Hole Treasure Trove Revealed by Deepest X-Ray Image Ever

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided an international team of astronomers an unparalleled image showing the growth of black holes over billions of years starting shortly after the Big Bang. The image is the deepest X-ray ever obtained and it was collected with eleven and a half weeks (about 7 million seconds) of Chandra observing time.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Black Hole Treasure Trove Revealed by Deepest X-Ray Image Ever

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided an international team of astronomers an unparalleled image showing the growth of black holes over billions of years starting shortly after the Big Bang. The image is the deepest X-ray ever obtained and it was collected with eleven and a half weeks (about 7 million seconds) of Chandra observing time.

More…

This is worth looking into in much more detail.

Why are the objects in the central region smaller than those outside?
I thought Chandra did it’s “deep field south” ten to twenty years ago, as part of the GOODS survey?
Early black holes grew in bursts rather than slowly? From what?
First black holes were very heavy. Why?
How many tiles were needed to mosaic this?

> I thought Chandra did it’s “deep field south” ten to twenty years ago, as part of the GOODS survey?

It did. There’s a report from 2007.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/goods/
“GOODS Chandra Deep Field-South: Missing Black Hole Report: Hundreds Found!”

> I thought Chandra did it’s “deep field south” ten to twenty years ago, as part of the GOODS survey?

It did. There’s a report from 2007.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/goods/
“GOODS Chandra Deep Field-South: Missing Black Hole Report: Hundreds Found!”

11 pointings from Oct 1999 – Dec 2000
Observation Time 278 hours.

mollwollfumble said:

> I thought Chandra did it’s “deep field south” ten to twenty years ago, as part of the GOODS survey?

It did. There’s a report from 2007.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/goods/
“GOODS Chandra Deep Field-South: Missing Black Hole Report: Hundreds Found!”

11 pointings from Oct 1999 – Dec 2000
Observation Time 278 hours.

Compare with new image, claimed “The image is the deepest X-ray ever obtained and it was collected with eleven and a half weeks (about 7 million seconds) of Chandra observing time.” That’s about 1950 hours as against the previous 278 hours. The new one is much deeper.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Black Hole Treasure Trove Revealed by Deepest X-Ray Image Ever

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided an international team of astronomers an unparalleled image showing the growth of black holes over billions of years starting shortly after the Big Bang. The image is the deepest X-ray ever obtained and it was collected with eleven and a half weeks (about 7 million seconds) of Chandra observing time.

More…

Original press release:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2017/cdfs/

Technical article about black hole growth from this image:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02614

Technical article about the Chandra survey:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03501

484.2 arcmin^2 field of view.

1008 sources that are detected in up to three X-ray bands: 0.5-7.0 keV, 0.5-2.0 keV, and 2-7 keV.

redshifts for 986 of these sources,

711 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from the main-catalog sources. 291 of the main-catalog sources have never been detected before in X-rays.

observing, for the first time, that normal galaxies start to dominate the X-ray source population at the faintest 0.5-2.0 keV flux levels.

Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), is arguably the most intensively studied multiwavelength deep-survey region across the entire sky.

total X-ray emission arising from 2076 galaxies

Maximum redshift 5.

X-ray emission from our sample is likely dominated by processes related to star formation.

low-rate mass accretion onto stellar mass BHs in individually X-ray-undetected galaxies is negligible.

Black hole accretion rate dominated by accretion onto active galactic nuclei.

Interesting, but not all that exciting.