Their secret? Use a galaxy, a collection of millions of stars, as a lens.
The gravitational pull of black holes compresses and super-heats the matter nearby, creating quasars. These emit vast amounts of light, often outshining the galaxies around them. The problem is the light is so far away, and coming from such a concentrated area, that it makes observing the black hole incredibly difficult.
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An image by a NASA artist shows a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. Australian astronomers have developed a new technique for viewing black holes as they consume matter.
Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, astronomer David Floyd of The University of Melbourne was able to enlarge the light emitted by a quasar and see, for the first time ever, black holes devouring matter.
Floyd hopes that this new discovery will usher in a new era of research into black holes, collapsed stars whose gravitational pull is so strong that they draw in all energy and matter around them.
"These early results are just a taste of what's to come," Floyd said on the university website. "This technique can probe regions just a few times larger than the black hole at the centre of a quasar in a matter of minutes, rather than decades."
Gravitational microlensing works by essentially using galaxies as lenses to separate the light from the quasar. When light from a quasar passes through a galaxy, the light is enlarged and split into a range of components that are easier to observe and analyze.
Floyd and his colleagues used data from the Magellan telescope in Chile and the NASA Hubble Space Telescope to show that 99 percent of the visible light coming from a quasar comes from a region about 1,000 times the size of the black hole itself.
That may sound big. But in space terms, it's next to nothing.
"This is so tiny in astronomical terms that it would take a telescope with a lens 100 kilometers across to observe directly," Floyd said.
Floyd hopes that this breakthrough will allow for greater studies of quasars.
"Conditions in a quasar are so extreme that they push the laws of physics to breaking point and beyond," he said. "They shape galaxies and drive the evolution of the Universe."