Article Posted on : - Aug 25, 2016

Black-hole-powered galaxies called blazars are the most common sources detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Photo: M. Weiss/CfA.

WASHINGTON (BNS): Astronomers studying distant galaxies powered by monster black holes have uncovered an unexpected link between two very different wavelengths of the light they emit, the mid-infrared and gamma rays.

The discovery, which was accomplished by comparing data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has enabled the researchers to uncover dozens of new blazar candidates.

"This connection links two vastly different forms of light over an energy range spanning a factor of 10 billion," Francesco Massaro at the University of Turin in Italy, was quoted as saying in the NASA news release.

"Ultimately, it will help us decipher how supermassive black holes in these galaxies manage to convert the matter around them into vast amounts of energy," he added.

Blazars constitute more than half of the discrete gamma-ray sources seen by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). At the heart of a blazar lies a supersized black hole with millions of times the sun's mass surrounded by a disk of hot gas and dust. As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, some of it forms dual jets that blast subatomic particles straight out of the disk in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.

A blazar appears bright to Fermi for two reasons. Its jets produce many gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, and we happen to be viewing the galaxy face on, which means one of its jets is pointing in our direction, the release added.

"WISE made it possible to explore the mid-infrared colors of known gamma-ray blazars. We found that when we plotted Fermi blazars by their WISE colors in a particular way, they occupied a distinctly different part of the plot than other extragalactic gamma-ray sources," said Raffaele D’Abrusco at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge.

The scientists detail new aspects of the infrared/gamma-ray connection in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on Aug. 9. They say the electrons, protons and other particles accelerated in blazar jets leave a specific "fingerprint" in the infrared light they emit. This same pattern is also clearly evident in their gamma rays. The relationship effectively connects the dots for blazars across an enormous swath of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.