Black holes are more common than they were believed to be, according to information released last month by astronomy and astrophysics professor Niel Brandt.

The black holes that Chandra, an orbiting X-ray telescope, is finding are objects with such a force of gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape from them, said Donald Schneider, professor of astronomy and astrophysics.

Material falls into the black holes at speeds of about 100,000 miles per second; it is the material colliding near the edge of the black holes that makes the light that the Chandra telescope detects.

"You wouldn't notice anything unusual if (the black hole) wasn't eating," said Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics.

Chandra monitored the Hubble Deep Field, a portion of the sky with about the same area as a quarter of a full moon, for about 23 days and detected faint particles of light.

Then the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbiting optical telescope, monitored the Hubble Deep Field and found galaxies where the particles of light were coming from, Schneider said.

Since practically every galaxy has one big black hole, it is believed that most of the light detections signify the existence of big black holes. About 600 sources of faint particles of light were detected.

Galaxies typically have one big black hole, 10 million small black holes, 100 billion stars and one trillion planets, Sigurdsson said.

While the faint particles of light are being detected now, some of them are between 10 and 12 billion years old.

At that age, they were created around when the universe was about four billion years old and big black holes were most active, Schneider said.

The universe is about 13.5 billion years old.

The ancient light allows scientists to look back and try to make a connection between galaxies and black holes, perhaps eventually coming to the conclusion that galaxies form around black holes, Schneider said.

"We're trying to get a picture of how the universe has evolved from its beginning to the present day," said Gordon Garmire, professor of astronomy and astrophysics.

While Chandra unveiled a greater prevalence of black holes than was known of in the past, it has not unraveled any of the mysteries of black holes themselves.

"Quite frankly, we have no idea what happens after material falls into the black hole and the only way to find out is to jump in," Sigurdsson said.