A RESURFACED image of a seemingly innocent night sky actually has a dark secret.
At first glance, the image captured by Europes LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope looks like it’s packed full of shiny white stars.
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In reality, those white dots are actually thousands of hungry supermassive black holes.
The vast amount of black holes are all devouring galaxy material millions of light-years away.
The remanents of what they’re devouring were picked up by the telescope.
The image was first released in 2021 as part of a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
It’s technically a condensed map of the night sky and contains over 25,000 supermassive black holes.
Research leader Francesco de Gasperin said at the time: “This is the result of many years of work on incredibly difficult data.
“We had to invent new methods to convert the radio signals into images of the sky.”
Each black hole you can see in the image is said to be located in a different galaxy.
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They’re all emitting matter which emits radio signals.
It’s these signals that can be picked up by telescopes on Earth.
The image is a result of a staggering 256 hours of observations.
It only shows about 4 percent of the northern half of the sky.
The astronomers are currently working on mapping the entire northern sky, which could reveal more space secrets.
This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
