Watch: Never before seen visuals of 22 black holes

New Delhi, May 04: NASA has released never before seen visuals of 22 black holes. Black holes are the dark abyss that are found at the centre of every galaxy.

NASA has been studying these unique mysterious objects in detail trying to understand their nature and how they play a part in the evolution of galaxies. Now it has released visuals of 22 such objects present in our Milky Way galaxy.

Stars born with more than about 20 times the Sun's mass end their lives as black holes. As the name implies, black holes don't glow on their own because nothing can escape them, not even light. Until 2015, when astronomers first detected merging black holes through the space-time ripples called gravitational waves, the main way to find these ebony enigmas was to search for them in binary systems where they interacted with companion stars. And the best way to do that was to look in X-rays, NASA said.

This visualisation shows 22 X-ray binaries in our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud, that host confirmed stellar-mass black holes. The systems appear at the same physical scale, demonstrating their diversity. Their orbital motion is sped up by nearly 22,000 times, and the viewing angles replicate how we see them from Earth, NASA also added.

When paired with a star, a black hole can collect matter in two ways. In many cases, a stream of gas can flow directly from the star to the black hole. In others, such as the first confirmed black hole system, Cygnus X-1, the star produces a dense outflow called a stellar wind, some of which the black hole's intense gravity gathers up. So far, there's no clear consensus on which mode is used by GRS 1915, the big system at the centre of the visualisation.

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