Like the smoke and mirrors that hide rabbits and larger animals (not to mention motorcycles, a Lear jet and the Statue of Liberty), a small subset of quasars have been using clouds of gas and dust, coupled with just the right angles, to mask the presence of nature's greatest beast -- the supermassive black hole.

But after years of feeling suspicious about the whole scheme, researchers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have slipped backstage and busted the illusion.

By peering in X-rays through the obscuring veils, the orbiting telescope revealed the distant objects for what they are, typical quasars seen at a certain angle and harboring their signature supermassive black holes.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources, are thought to be ancient galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. With 90 percent of them, researchers see a signature of the black hole in the form of hot gas shining in X-rays, which represents matter falling rapidly into a black hole.

But in 10 percent of the cases, two things happen: These immense clouds of gas and dust are shot out, creating a doughnut-shaped ring around the quasar. This doughnut obscures the central region, where the black hole sits.

The new Chandra observations peered through these clouds in 10 shrouded quasars. Inside, the researchers saw the same old black hole signature -- hot gas shining in X-rays.

Therefore, non-shrouded quasars and shrouded quasars are now confirmed to be the same thing, just seen from different angles.

The quasars that Chandra focused on generate tremendous amounts of debris, pushing it outward at millions of miles (kilometers) per hour. The resulting clouds absorb visible light, just like smoke on a stage, thereby hiding what's going on inside.

"Chandra is beginning to show us that these quasars are all the same underneath, regardless of what they are wearing on the outside," said Tom Aldcroft, a researcher from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who worked on the study.

When scientists first noticed quasars in the 1950s and '60s, based on emissions of radio waves, they thought they were strange nearby stars. But by measuring their redshift -- the change in the wavelength of light emanating from the object based on whether it moves toward or away from us -- astronomers figured out that quasars were billions of light-years away.

They are therefore correspondingly old, with their radio and X-ray emissions just now reaching us. And it must be a powerful source of radiation to shine so brightly from so far away, so long ago.

In fact, researchers figure that quasars radiate as much energy per second as a thousand or more galaxies, from a region that is about one-millionth the size of the galaxy in which they reside. Scientists liken it to a small flashlight capable of beaming out all the light produced in the Los Angeles basin.

The central powerhouses for quasars are supermassive black holes. Our own Milky Way Galaxy, like most or all galaxies, has a supermassive black hole at its center, but it is not feeding as voraciously as are those in quasars. (Another study this year showed that black holes seem to have on/off switches.)

The term "quasar" is just a leftover from what scientists originally thought they were -- stellar objects. In reality, a quasar is just an ancient galaxy with a really, really powerful black hole.

But while most quasars are extremely bright in optical light, the shrouded variety with the powerful outflows have left astronomers puzzled, debating whether they represent an early evolutionary stage of black holes when they vigorously consume matter, or whether these energetic outflows are present in all quasars, but detectable only when viewed in certain orientations.

"Because high-energy X-rays can pierce through these clouds, we can use Chandra to observe close to the underlying black hole," said Paul Green, also of the Center for Astrophysics and lead author of a paper on the findings set to appear in the Astrophysical Journal. "Looking through these veils, we find that the extremely hot gas around these supermassive black holes shines just the same way as in non-shrouded quasars."

Black holes themselves cannot be seen. But researchers detect their presence by noting the bright emissions created when matter swirls near the point of no return surrounding a black hole, known as the event horizon. The wild action heats up the matter and creates X-ray emissions.

The Chandra study involved a process known as spectroscopy, the study of how atoms absorb and emit light or other electromagnetic radiation. X-ray spectroscopy allows astronomers to create "fingerprints" of very high-energy objects at great distances.

"Our work lends weight to the theory that all quasars possess obscuring doughnuts of thick gas and dust," said team member Smita Mathur of Ohio State University. "However, the difference is that some 'normal' quasars are being observed through the top into the doughnut hole, while the shrouded ones are being seen through the side."

The fact that this type of black hole-hiding quasar exists and no comprehensive X-ray observations have been undertaken to count them indicates that the giant black hole population in the universe is much higher than studies with optical telescopes have indicated.

Researchers now believe that as many as 200 million supermassive black holes, and even more small, star-sized black holes, existed in the early years of the universe.

Still, because black holes exist so far only in theory, there is a miniscule chance that the whole idea is illusory. And perhaps Mr. Copperfield really did disappear into the Bermuda Triangle and make his way back again.

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