Scientists Shining Light Into Black Holes

"This is brand new territory; we have no theories to guide us," said Neil Gehrels, lead investigator for Swift at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. "It's stretching our models to the biggest extent of any burst so far."

This process of identifying black holes, which Gehrels said may well number in the hundreds of millions, is one step on the path toward understanding them better. Other researchers have sought to measure the two known characteristics of a black hole -- its mass and the speed at which it spins. That spinning, and the gravitational force it reflects, is so great that black holes drag surrounding space, stars and gases into them.

Using data from NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics determined last year that one particularly large black hole was spinning at more than 950 times per second.

The fast pace of recent discoveries has set the stage for a new generation of sophisticated observatories, which together have been dubbed Beyond Einstein by NASA. While several of the proposed satellites would study black holes, the most pertinent is Constellation-X, a four-telescope X-ray observatory planned to be 100 times as powerful as any instrument now available for probing X-ray radiation and black holes.

Constellation-X could revolutionize the understanding of black holes and the very nature of gravity, but budget cuts, to some extent prompted by NASA's ambitious plans for renewed manned space exploration, have put the $1.5 billion-to-$2 billion project on hold.

The agency has held out the promise that some Beyond Einstein funding will be available in the 2009 budget, and last year NASA asked the National Research Council to convene an expert panel to recommend which of five major Beyond Einstein projects is most valuable and ready to go. A selection is expected by fall.

"There's no doubt there will be blood on the floor when that process is finished," said Wheeler of the Astronomical Society, who is also an expert on black holes. "There's so much promise here with Con-X to understand some of the most basic workings of the universe. But we all understand that while it may be selected, it also may well not be selected for now."

Some researchers say new revelations could come from a very different direction. The world's largest particle accelerator, the European Large Hadron Collider, is set to begin operations this year, and some think the extremely violent collisions it will generate can and will create tiny black holes.

In any event, research into black holes will continue. What remains unclear is whether that research will solve the mysteries in bits and pieces or whether it will, with the help of powerful new technologies, rapidly reveal the secrets hidden in their hitherto unfathomable depths.