![]() “Imaging a black hole is just the beginning of our effort to develop new tools that will enable us to interpret the massively complex data that nature gives us,” Psaltis added. “If we really want to go all the way back and figure out why we’re here - not just why we’re in Ontario - but you know why our planet is here, why we’re here at all, understanding that big picture is part of that.” ![]() “Although that’s not always obvious in our everyday life, the universe and its properties have a lot to do with how we ended up here. “It’s important because it’s a big part of the universe around us,” Barmby said. The picture has a lot to tell you about how black holes interact with the galaxies around them – which will contribute to a greater understanding of the universe. READ MORE: Israel set to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon Why does it matter? What Are Black Holes A black hole has a gravitational pull that is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape it once inside a certain region, called the event horizon. Underpinning the scientific process, the high-performance computing and big data research platforms that NCI provides make the next astronomical discovery that much more likely.“Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but there’s literally nothing like a picture of the real universe, however fuzzy and monochromatic,” Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Ethan Vishniac told the Associated Press. Its growing dataset provides rich insight into some of the fundamental questions about the universe. The SkyMapper project, led by the ANU, continues to provide an invaluable service to the astronomy research community. In turn, this lets researchers aim higher on the back of robust, reliable and powerful underpinning infrastructure. NCI plays a valuable role in the research community, enabling new and exciting science approaches by taking care of the data management challenges. Professor Christian Wolf from the ANU says that “it is a sign of the maturity of the whole project and its NCI support that we take the ease of making data enquiries for granted these days.” With the data and the analysis platform all hosted at NCI, astronomers can focus on their scientific questions instead of the data management challenges. The All-Sky Virtual Observatory provides a simple and seamless experience for researchers to search through and analyse observations from within the SkyMapper dataset. It’s quite incredible to be able to come across something like this in the course of our research.” The image of the newly discovered black hole named J1144, as captured by the Sky Mapper telescope. Mr Lai says, “We found this black hole while we were looking for something completely different – star pairs in our own galaxy. For SkyMapper, that exposure to the world is enabled through NCI's support of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory.” The possibilities of the SkyMapper data expand immeasurably when it is made available to the larger community. Image from Christian Wolf via and the Digital Sky Survey 2.ĭr Onken says, “One of the reasons to build a cosmic atlas like the SkyMapper Southern Survey is to enable astronomers to find objects they didn't even know they were looking for. The superimposed moon image gives a sense of the scale of the picture. The researchers found the black hole hiding in the centre of where the square has been drawn, amongst an uncountable array of stars in all directions. As an easily accessible reference data collection, it allows them and researchers around the world to readily use this high-resolution survey of the entire Southern Sky. Researchers from The Australian National University looking through the SkyMapper collection have spotted a completely unexpected black hole, 7,000 times brighter than all the light in our galaxy.ĭr Christopher Onken and PhD candidate Samuel Lai make use of the SkyMapper data to search for interesting astronomical phenomena. ![]() NCI hosts the globally recognised SkyMapper data collection, a unique set of images of the Southern Sky, recently used to discover the fastest growing black hole in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history. ![]()
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