NASA's WISE Survey Uncovers Millions of Black Holes

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
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J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
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News release: 2012-265 Aug. 29, 2012

NASA's WISE Survey Uncovers Millions of Black Holes

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-265&cid=release_2012-265

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a
bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-
obscured galaxies.

Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe
and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These
powerful galaxies, which burn brightly with infrared light, are nicknamed hot DOGs.

"WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE program scientist at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We've found an asteroid dancing ahead of Earth in its orbit, the
coldest star-like orbs known and now, supermassive black holes and galaxies hiding behind cloaks of
dust."

WISE scanned the whole sky twice in infrared light, completing its survey in early 2011. Like night-
vision goggles probing the dark, the telescope captured millions of images of the sky. All the data
from the mission have been released publicly, allowing astronomers to dig in and make new
discoveries.

The latest findings are helping astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black
holes at their centers grow and evolve together. For example, the giant black hole at the center of our
Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, has 4 million times the mass of our sun and has gone
through periodic feeding frenzies where material falls towards the black hole, heats up and irradiates
its surroundings. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut
down star formation in galaxies.

In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive
black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away.
About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible
light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust,
causing it to glow in infrared light.

"We've got the black holes cornered," said Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the WISE black hole study and project scientist for another NASA
black-hole mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). "WISE is finding them
across the full sky, while NuSTAR is giving us an entirely new look at their high-energy X-ray light
and learning what makes them tick."

In two other WISE papers, researchers report finding what are among the brightest galaxies known,
one of the main goals of the mission. So far, they have identified about 1,000 candidates.

These extreme objects can pour out more than 100 trillion times as much light as our sun. They are so
dusty, however, that they appear only in the longest wavelengths of infrared light captured by WISE.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope followed up on the discoveries in more detail and helped show that,
in addition to hosting supermassive black holes feverishly snacking on gas and dust, these DOGs are
busy churning out new stars.

"These dusty, cataclysmically forming galaxies are so rare WISE had to scan the entire sky to find
them," said Peter Eisenhardt, lead author of the paper on the first of these bright, dusty galaxies, and
project scientist for WISE at JPL. "We are also seeing evidence that these record setters may have
formed their black holes before the bulk of their stars. The 'eggs' may have come before the
'chickens.'"

More than 100 of these objects, located about 10 billion light-years away, have been confirmed using
the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the Gemini Observatory in Chile,
Palomar's 200-inch Hale telescope near San Diego, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory
near Tucson, Ariz.

The WISE observations, combined with data at even longer infrared wavelengths from Caltech's
Submillimeter Observatory atop Mauna Kea, revealed that these extreme galaxies are more than twice
as hot as other infrared-bright galaxies. One theory is their dust is being heated by an extremely
powerful burst of activity from the supermassive black hole.

"We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies," said Jingwen Wu of JPL, lead
author of the study on the submillimeter observations. All three papers are being published in the
Astrophysical Journal.

The three technical journal articles, including PDFs, can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0811,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5517 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5518 .

JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The
principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under
NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The
science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was
built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data
processing and archiving take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise , http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and
http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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