BYU Researchers Studying Black Hole
Contributed By Sierra Naumu Thomas, BYU
Professor Mike Joner and grad student Carla Carroll, BYU astrophysicists, measure a black hole.
Article Highlights
- Through a study, BYU researchers were able to determine many characteristics of a distant black hole.
- The black hole, found in the galaxy known as KA 1858, was determined to be about 8 million times the mass of the sun.
“After lots of collaboration, we were both learning amazing things and coming up with new ideas and possibilities.” —Carla Carroll, coauthor of study
PROVO, UTAH
If a person wants to see just how far BYU’s latest research extends, they can look up toward the sky, focus their view between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, and then zoom in about 100 million light years.
That’s the home of a galaxy known as KA 1858, which contains a black hole that BYU scientists observed with the help of NASA and other astrophysicists throughout the University of California system.
The study, which appears in the Astrophysical Journal, estimates that this black hole has a mass of approximately 8 million times the mass of the sun.
Originally, the NASA Kepler satellite’s main mission was to hunt for earth-like planets in our own galaxy. In this study, however, researchers were able to combine data from the Kepler mission with ground-based data to observe black hole characteristics. Many of the ground-based observations were performed at BYU’s West Mountain Observatory, the largest research observatory in Utah.
“It was a long project that involved lots of different observers, some of them around the world,” said Professor Michael Joner, coauthor of the study. “Using measurements that were done at BYU, we were able to determine that the mass of the central black hole for this galaxy was about 8 million times the mass of the sun—that’s a really, really massive object.”
Astronomers are used to measuring light radiated by different types of objects, and black holes are very difficult to measure because they don’t give off any radiant energy. For this reason, Professor Joner and masters student Carla Carroll, who is also a coauthor of the study, used a method known as reverberation mapping.
Reverberation mapping involves observing the light that is emitted as material spirals toward the black hole. At different distances from the center, the light interacts with nearby gases, which then reemit that light.
These groups of light reach the ground-based telescope within a few days of each other. By analyzing this time difference and by measuring how fast the material is moving around the center of the galaxy, they were able to determine the mass of this central black hole.
According to Carla Carroll, current techniques for this method require some of the largest, and quite overbooked, telescopes in the world. She and her coauthor are working on a way to use smaller telescopes that have the abilities to observe different active galaxies. This way, astrophysicists everywhere can have the ability to do this research using smaller and less costly telescopes.
“After lots of collaboration, we were both learning amazing things and coming up with new ideas and possibilities,” she said.
