Feasting Black Holes Caught in Galactic Spiderweb

Black hole illustration. Credit: Aurore Simonnet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

• To look for black holes around the “Spiderweb” galaxy, astronomers observed for over 8 days with

  Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/P. Tozzi et al; Optical (Subaru): NAOJ/NINS; Optical (HST): NASA/STScI

Often, a spiderweb conjures the idea of captured prey soon to be consumed by a waiting predator. In the case of the “Spiderweb” protocluster, however, objects that lie within a giant cosmic web are feasting and growing, according to data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The Spiderweb galaxy, officially known as J1140-2629, gets its nickname from its web-like appearance in some optical light images. This likeness can be seen in the inset box where data from NASA’s

To look for growing black holes in the Spiderweb protocluster a team of researchers observed it for over eight days with Chandra. In the main panel of this graphic, a composite image of the Spiderweb protocluster shows X-rays detected by Chandra (also in purple) that have been combined with optical data from the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii (red, green, and white). The large image is 11.3 million light years across.

14 sources detected by Chandra. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/P. Tozzi et al; Optical (Subaru): NAOJ/NINS; Optical (HST): NASA/STScI

Most of the “blobs” in the optical image are galaxies in the protocluster, including 14 that have been detected in the new, deep Chandra image. These X-ray sources reveal the presence of material falling towards…

Read More: Feasting Black Holes Caught in Galactic Spiderweb