Pink Black Holes: Home Page

Fresh Science Award

Pictures

The following pictures are true-color: ie. they are what the human eye would see were it one thousand million times more sensitive. Unfortunately, the pink colour is quite subtle and doesn't always come out when printing these pictures. If you are having this trouble, I've included pictures below with stretched colour maps, to emphasise the colours: these should print better.

• (jpeg image, 29kb)
  Copy of the same image without annotations, markings, and border. (jpeg, 9kb)
  Annotated image with colours amplified for printing. (jpeg, 34kb)
  Colour amplified image without annotations etc. (jpeg, 24kb)
  Postscript version (postscript, 568kb)

  Original Raw Data, before the smoothing, clipping and bad pixel removal that I have applied to the original data. This is the highest resolution you'll get! Funny colour marks all over the image are bad pixels on the CCD or cosmic ray hits.The object is half way up but somewhat right of centre.
  Clipped subset of the above, showing the pink black hole and the star lying just south-west of it on the sky.

  Quasar (black hole) PKS 1437-153, showing its pink colour. We have now discovered about 100 quasars like this. If the colour doesn't show up on your printer, try the colour amplified images where I've computer- enhanced the colour.

  This picture was taken using the one-metre telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. This quasar is about one billion light-years away (30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres). The colour picture was produced by combining separate blue, green and red images. Each image was obtained with a CCD camera and a 300 second exposure: all images were obtained in good conditions on the night of 13th July 1997. North is up and East is to the left. The whitish object in the bottom right is an unrelated star in our own galaxy, less than 1000 light years away from Earth.

• (jpeg image, 27kb)
  Copy of the same image without annotations, markings, and border (jpeg, 4kb)
  A more normal blue black hole: Quasar PKS 0202-172, showing its blue-white colours. Until our work, it was thought that all quasars were this colour.

  This picture was taken using the 2.3-metre telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. This quasar is about eight billion light-years away (240,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres). The colour picture was produced by combining separate blue, green and red images. Each image was obtained with a CCD camera and a 180 second exposure: all images were obtained in good conditions on the night of 9th September 1997. North is up and East is to the left.

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  Copy of the same image without annotations, markings, and border.
  Quasar (black hole) PKS 1133-172. This is a normal blue quasar hidden behind some interstellar dust, which gives it the dusky yellow colour. It has taken us a great deal of work to discriminate between blue-but-obscured quasars like this, and true pink quasars.

  This picture was taken using the 2.3-metre telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. This quasar is about five billion light-years away (150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres). The colour picture was produced by combining separate blue, green and red images. Each image was obtained with a CCD camera and a 30 minute exposure: all images were obtained in good conditions on the night of 15th April 1997. North is up and East is to the left. The other objects in the picture are unrelated stars and galaxies at different distances.

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  Dr Paul Francis, looking through the Farnham telescope at Mt Stromlo Observatory. This antique telescope was not used in this research: we only using for teaching purposes. But it does look pretty!

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  Dr Paul Francis at the controls of a large modern telescope. This is the sort of environment we worked in while finding and studying the pink black holes.

• For pictures of the telescope used in this work, go here and click on the Siding Spring Observatory 40" or 2.3m buttons.