Genuine black hole pictures!

[drr0b]

Hi everyone, this is my first post! I've enjoyed photography for years, and last weekend I got my first dSLR: a Canon 500D, with the 18-55mm kit lens and the 50mm/1.8 prime. I hope to share and learn a great deal here, but I thought I'd start with something a bit different.

I'm a professional astronomer, and use X-rays to look at the most extreme environments in the universe. Here is a normal photo of the Sculptor galaxy, about 10 million light years away


And here is the same galaxy in X-rays

Camera: XMM-Newton/EPIC
Aperture: 1/1250
Focal length 7500 mm
Exposure 110000 s (about 30 hours)

The white ellipse shows the outline of the galaxy. Even though there are around 100 billion stars in the Sculptor galaxy, only a tiny fraction are visible in X-rays... they are nearly all
vampiric systems such as the one below, where a black hole (or neutron star) sucks the life out of a normal star,


The dots you see outside the ellipse are mostly gigantic black holes at the hearts of distant galaxies, millions of times heavier than the sun.

[picnik]

Welcome to DPS drr0b...
professional astronomer huh... that's pretty darn cool
I really like the first shot...
thanks for sharing

[chrean]

My goodness, what a start!

First off, welcome to DPS.
Then, thank you for sharing such images. Being myself an astrophile interested in astrophysics I find them very interesting.

P.S. I'm feeling envious about your job!

[Xtrah]

This is quite possibly one of the coolest things I've seen. Your exposure time of 30 hours is pretty epic. This is just to cool to pass up!

[Known]

Aperture: 1/1250
Focal length 7500 mm
Exposure 110000 s (about 30 hours)

Now if only my 5D EOS mark ii could get those exposure settings.......

[Mad Ged]

Fascinating images, thank you. I don't think my zoom lens can quite make it to 10 million light years.

Cheers,

Gerard

[JeffSmith]

Awesome, thank you for posting drrob. I look forward to seeing more of our universe (or is it multiverse?)

[ihsankhairir]

wow, 30 hours! I assume the camera had to move to compensate for the earth's relative movement?

[drr0b]

Thanks for the welcome

Known: those exposure settings cost big time :P! That exposure alone is worth about $300,000; it's a good job you get more than a picture! Every photon is tagged with position, time of arrival and energy (colour), so I have several months' worth of research and two papers in international journals from that baby.

XMM-Newton is a satellite observatory built by the European Space Agency; you need a satellite for X-ray astronomy, because luckily, no X-rays can go through the Earth's atmosphere... otherwise we would be cooked by the Sun!

Mad Ged: I wish I could just zoom as well, that would make my life a lot easier! The second image has a field of view that just about covers the full moon. The blobs look so big because of the camera response; they are really infinitessimally small; if the blobs were really that size, they would be around 500 light years across! We can see them as individual light sources because a) they are so rare that you can expect to see only 1 in that 500 light year blob and b) they are incredibly bright: the faintest is about 10,000 times more luminous than the sun, and the brightest will be many millions of times brighter

ihsankhairir: XMM is orbiting the Earth every 48 hours, so is moving a lot!

[Fred flyfisher]

Welcome to DPS. I love your post too!