Chandra Release - July 15, 2020

Visual Description: Obscured AGN in the Chandra Deep Field South

A group of black holes has been identified that had previously been mistaken for a different kind of black hole. The misjudged black holes were found in the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), the deepest X-ray image ever taken. On the right of this graphic at right is the CDF-S, which contains over 7 million seconds of observing time from Chandra collected over many years. The image looks like a splattering of tiny multicolored dots on a black canvas. 
In this image, red, green, and blue represent the low, medium, and high-energy X-rays that Chandra can detect. Most of the points in this image are a black hole.
Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in surrounding material, which is heated and produces radiation at a wide range of wavelengths including X-rays. Many astronomers think this growth includes a phase, which happened billions of years ago, when a dense cocoon of dust and gas covers most black holes. These cocoons of material, which are the fuel source that enables the black hole to grow and generate radiation, are depicted in an artist's illustration in the inset at left. A puffy red cocoon, shaped like a donut, surrounds a disk of material falling onto the black hole. A wispy wind of blue colored material is blowing away from the disk. A portion of the cocoon is cut out to show the heavily obscured black hole at the center.