Post by Deleted on Jul 2, 2015 18:49:57 GMT 7
Armed with a cheap camera and a fisheye lens, an unknown amateur photographer who only named himself as "Silent Bob" has caused a storm amongst the worlds leading astro-physicians around the globe.
"The photograph was actually took in May last year", claimed Bob.
"I never really bothered before to take a photo of the sky, previously I didn't have a tripod or any lenses wide enough, also my camera suffers from bad amp noise and hot pixels on long exposures"
"Living near the city there is also a lot of light pollution, all these problems add up. One night I thought screw it, the International Space Station was due to pass overhead with a 6 minute visibility timeframe and magnitude of -6. That's 100 times; relative to magnitude, brighter than the brightest star Sirius. I was just testing this stuff out, I don't really know what I'm doing, you just aim it and press a button, right?"
"It was only when I looked at the photo later at pixel level, I noticed a distant comet or shooting star. Upon closer inspection I found what appeared to be black holes. The photo isn't very detailed as it's a 300% crop off a 10 mega pixel sensor, but I believe the evidence is there".
We spoke to leading astrophysicists in California.
"Silent Bob's finding revealed a new feature about active black holes we never knew before, yet the details remain a mystery," said Lin Yan of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "We hope his work will inspire future studies to better understand these fascinating objects."
Yan is the second author of the research accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is post-doctoral researcher, Emilio Donoso, who worked with Yan at IPAC and has since moved to the Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio in Argentina. The research also was co-authored by Daniel Stern at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, and Roberto Assef of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and formerly of JPL.
Every galaxy has a massive black hole at its heart. The new study focuses on the "feeding" ones, called active, supermassive black holes, or active galactic nuclei. These black holes gorge on surrounding gas material that fuels their growth. Without the data we collected from Silent Bob we wouldn't have known exactly where to look.
