Watch | largest X-ray of universe revealed by scientists

The largest ever X-ray map of the universe has been revealed by scientists in which more than 9,00,000 high-energy cosmic sources and over 7,00,000 supermassive black holes have been found.

On January 31, the German "eROSITA" consortium published the data collected by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on board the Russian-German satellite Spektrum-RG.

The Max Planck Society in Germany, which helped manage the mission, said in a statement that the first eROSITA All-Sky Survey Catalogue (eRASS1) is the largest collection of X-ray sources ever published.

The agency said, "In the first six months of observation, eROSITA has already discovered more X-ray sources than have been known in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy."

Besides around 7,10,000 supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, the 9,00,000 high-energy cosmic sources also included 1,80,000 X-ray emitting stars in the Milky Way, 12,000 clusters of galaxies and a small number of other exotic classes of sources like X-ray emitting binary stars, supernova remnants, pulsars, and other objects.

Andrea Merloni, eROSITA principal investigator, commented on the report saying, "These are mind-blowing numbers for X-ray astronomy."

"We've detected more sources in 6 months than the big flagship missions XMM-Newton and Chandra have done in nearly 25 years of operation," she added.