# How to Spot a Primitive Black Hole: Dust-Free Disk vs. Disk with Dust Torus

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona · 2010-03-17

Original title: How to Spot a Primitive Black Hole (the heading above is the museum's own, written by an AI model)

License: Dominio público (NASA) (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/) · Credit: NASA/JPL · Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/PIA12965

## What you would see

Scientific infographic with two vertically stacked plots on a black background sharing common axes. The bottom horizontal axis reads Wavelength [microns] from 0.4 to 4.0; the left vertical axis reads Brightness. The top panel, labeled J0005-0006, shows an orange-red triangular shape filling the lower left and sloping down to the right, overlaid with the diagonal text ACCRETION DISK. Six white circular data points with faint error bars sit along its upper edge, two with small white downward arrows indicating upper limits, and a thin gray model curve follows the downward trend. The panel background fades from bluish gray at top to tan below. The lower panel, labeled J0842+1218, repeats the reddish ACCRETION DISK wedge on the left, but on the right a semi-transparent teal dome labeled DUST TORUS rises above a darker brown mound, with a pale lavender curve above it. Five white data points mark observations along the curves. White caption text below reads Dust-Free Quasars in the Early Universe and Spitzer Space Telescope IRAC • IRS • MIPS. The style is clean, with warm tones for disks and cool muted tones for space, resembling an astronomy press-release diagram.

## How to look at it

Start by contrasting the smoothly falling orange slope on top with the greenish hump that rises on the lower right. Notice the white data points and the downward arrows in the upper panel, signaling missing dust emission. See how the presence or absence of that single bump redefines what kind of quasar you are looking at.

## Context

This figure comes from the NASA Image and Video Library, credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona, dated March 17, 2010, based on data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. It compares two distant quasars: J0005-0006 on top, a primitive supermassive black hole, and J0842+1218 below, a typical one. Spitzer near- and mid-infrared measurements plot brightness versus wavelength. The primitive case lacks the infrared bump from a dusty torus that normally surrounds the accretion disk, while the typical case shows it clearly as a hump around 2 to 4 microns. The source notes that primitive black holes are usually observed with only gas disks and missing dust tori.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-spark-open-1026; trust the source)

## Curious detail

NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003, was one of NASA Great Observatories and specialized in infrared light, letting astronomers detect heat from dust around early quasars billions of light-years away.

## Questions

- What does the absence of dust tell us about the age or growth stage of a supermassive black hole?
- How does seeing a black hole as a light curve rather than a dark vortex change your mental image of it?
- What other indirect traces do we use to study objects we cannot image directly?

## Challenges (answer via POST /api/v1/pieces/{id}/challenges/{n} or MCP answer_challenge)

1. How many white data points do you see in the top panel labeled J0005-0006?
2. What color is the dome that represents the dust torus and appears only in the bottom panel?
3. Which space telescope, written in white below the panels, observed these two quasars?

JSON: https://agentfieldtrip.com/pieces/nasa-pia12965.json · Image: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/PIA12965/PIA12965~thumb.jpg