Last week, many Rochestarians looked to the skies at night — despite the frequent cloud cover — hoping to catch a glimpse of the Perseid Meteor Shower. The American Meteorological Society promised that this year’s annual show of shooting stars could produce double the usual amount of meteor sightings per hour.

What many locals might have missed in the night sky, however, is the presence of gaping black holes throughout the universe, including one in our very own Milky Way Galaxy.

Black holes, by their very nature, give off no light, making them difficult for astronomers to identify and study. However, new X-ray technologies from NASA and the California Institute of Technology may have found a way to shed a whole new light on this mysterious phenomenon of space.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, onboard NASA’s Chandra satellite, has successfully identified various black holes by picking up on the high-energy X-rays they emit. Researchers have likened these frequencies to a “song,” with each black hole producing their own “voice” to make up a choir of the cosmos.

“We knew this cosmic choir had a strong high-pitched component, but we still don’t know if it comes from a lot of smaller, quiet singers, or a few with loud voices,” said Daniel Stern, the project scientist for NuSTAR at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Now, thanks to NuSTAR, we’re gaining a better understanding of the black holes and starting to address these questions.”

X-ray technologies have continued to evolve from their common role in the doctor’s office to 3D scanners that can measure the porosity of a casting or detect faults and cracks in the smallest of parts — or largest of galaxies. The NuSTAR data may help researchers understand how and why black holes form, grow, or die.

Principal investigator Fiona Harrison said her team at Caltech has been able to increase their identification of black holes from two percent to 35% with the NuSTAR data.

“Before NuSTAR, the X-ray background in high-energies was just one blur with no resolved sources,” Harrison said. Now, “we can see the most obscured black holes, hidden in thick gas and dust.”