NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Swift XMM-Newton Satellites Tune Into a Middleweight Black Hole

While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

"Intermediate-mass black holes contain between 100 and 10,000 times the sun's mass," explained Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at Goddard. "We observe the heavyweight black holes in the centers of galaxies and the lightweight ones orbiting stars in our own galaxy. But finding the 'tweeners' remains a challenge."

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Mission Update:

For mission updates visit the Swift Mission Director's Status Report Log.

Swift is a first-of-its-kind multi-wavelength observatory dedicated to the study of gamma-ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments will work together to observe GRBs and afterglows in the gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands. The main mission objectives for Swift are to:

• Determine the origin of gamma-ray bursts
• Classify gamma-ray bursts and search for new types
• Determine how the blastwave evolves and interacts with the surroundings
• Use gamma-ray bursts to study the early universe
• Perform the first sensitive hard X-ray survey of the sky