Five Black Holes Found, Millions Thought To Be Hidden

It isn't too difficult to discover empty spaces, isnt' it?

However, black holes aren't easy to find.

British astronomers have found five "supermassive" black holes, which were earlier hidden under layers of dust and gas. Scientists think that millions of giant black holes in the universe are still not visible, according to rt.

This black hole has a powerful cosmic mass with tremendous gravitational pull, from which nothing can escape, including light.

Supermassive black holes are thought to be magnetic cosmic drains that "suck materials into a point of infinite density formed by the compressed mass of countless suns, from hundreds of thousands to billions," according to techtimes.

The discoveries of the British astronomers from Durham University have been displayed at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, at Venue Cymru, in Llandudno, Wales.

The black holes were noticed by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) orbiting observatory. This wonder observatory can "pick up extremely high-energy X-rays from faraway distances and identify black holes that are light years away."

The detailed findings were impossible before the observatory was launched in 2012, and can identify much higher energy X-rays, according to the scientists.

"They were spotted when the NuSTAR was pointed at the collection of newly-discovered black holes," according to rt.

The black holes were a lively bunch of bright, busy spaces. "[They] rapidly feasted on surrounding material and emitted large amounts of radiation," according to the study's lead author George Lansbury, a postgraduate student in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University.

"For a long time we have known about supermassive black holes that are not obscured by dust and gas, but we suspected that many more were hidden," Lansbury said. "Thanks to NuSTAR for the first time we have been able to clearly see these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive."

Scientists are excited at the prospect of more such black holes. "Although we have only detected five, when we extrapolate across the whole universe then the predicted numbers are huge," Lansbury stated.