Two supermassive black holes, which appear to be separated by the smallest distance ever seen, were detected at different wavelengths. Located in UGC 4211, two galaxies in the final stage of merging and located about 480 million light-years from Earth, the objects are 200 and 125 million times the mass of the Sun, respectively, and appear to be separated by only 750 light-years.
- 10 answers to questions you might have about black holes
- Sagittarius A*: Everything We Know About “Our” Black Hole — So Far
As they devour matter that has come too close, supermassive black holes emit jets and winds that form an active, luminous galactic core. The authors of the new study matched these emissions with that of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, which indicated black holes feeding on the “feast” formed by the products of the galactic collision.
These black holes found each other as galaxies collided. Eventually, they’ll start orbiting each other — and, as gas and stars approach them and steal orbital energy, they’ll move closer together. At some point, they’re going to start producing gravitational waves stronger than any ever detected; eventually they will collide, forming an even bigger black hole.
–
Feedly: subscribe to our RSS feed and don’t miss any Canaltech content on your favorite news aggregator.
–
Michael Koss, lead author of the study, notes that ALMA has high spatial resolution for observing nearby objects. “Our study identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a galactic collision, and as we know they are much more common in the distant universe, these binary black holes may also be much more common than we thought,” he said.
Even with ALMA’s capabilities, the team used other telescopes to get a “full picture” of black holes. So they worked with data from the Chandra, Hubble, Very Large Telescope and WM Keck observatory in Hawaii. Together, the data offered a complete view of galaxies merging at different wavelengths.
Below, you can see an animation that represents the black holes devouring the gas, dust and other materials dispersed by the collision:
“Each wavelength tells us a different part of the story,” said Ezequiel Treister, co-author of the study. “While ground-based optical images showed us the entire merging galaxy, Hubble revealed the nuclear regions in high resolution, and X-ray observations showed that there was at least one active nucleus in the system,” he explained. “And ALMA showed us the exact location of these two hungry, growing black holes,” he concluded.
Although they are common events, mergers of distant galaxies are not simple to observe. Thus, the detection of a close merger, together with a pair of supermassive black holes, can even help in detecting the gravitational waves produced by them. “There could be several pairs of supermassive black holes growing at the centers of galaxies, but which we have yet to identify,” added Treister.
The article with the results of the study was published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Read the article on Canaltech.
Trending on Canaltech:
- Why are scientists storing frozen stool samples from around the world?
- 8 bizarre and scary movies with killer clowns
- Do you know the difference between flooding, inundation and flooding?
- Is removing ear wax harmful? understand the importance of cerumen
- 7 cars that will change in 2023
- 10 games that had disastrous launches
