SoylentNews

Seeing Double: Scientists Find Elusive Giant Black Hole Pairs

posted by mrpg on Thursday October 05 2017, @09:06AM   
from the better-pairs-than-trios dept.

"exec" writes:

Astronomers have identified a bumper crop of dual supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. This discovery could help astronomers better understand how giant black holes grow and how they may produce the strongest gravitational wave signals in the Universe.

The new evidence reveals five pairs of supermassive black holes, each containing millions of times the mass of the Sun. These black hole couples formed when two galaxies collided and merged with each other, forcing their supermassive black holes close together.

The black hole pairs were uncovered by combining data from a suite of different observatories including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Sky Explorer Survey (WISE), and the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

"Astronomers find single supermassive black holes all over the universe," said Shobita Satyapal, from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who led one of two papers describing these results. "But even though we've predicted they grow rapidly when they are interacting, growing dual supermassive black holes have been difficult to find."

Seeing double: Scientists find elusive giant black hole pairs

-- submitted from IRC

---

Original Submission

• Finding where the black hole mergers happend Finding where the black hole mergers happend (Score: 2) by dx3bydt3 on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:08AM (1 child)

  by dx3bydt3 (82) on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:08AM (#577400)

  These pairs were found by choosing merged galaxies for observation. Perhaps the same technique can be used to retroactively identify candidate galaxies where LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves. At this point detecting the direction of the black hole mergers only just became possible, and isn't precise enough to identify a specific galaxy. Looking for the characteristics that suggest a past galactic merger could narrow down the candidates. One factor I don't know if they've got a good estimate on is distance. Does anyone know if LIGO and Virgo have any way of determining the distance of the events they've recorded?

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:Finding where the black hole mergers happend (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:22AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:22AM (#577742)

  They can't detect the gravitational waves emitted by these sorts of supermassive black hole binaries yet. Those produce gravitational waves in the nanohertz frequencies: the corresponding wavelengths are more than thirty light-years long! Now if there were a merger though it would probably be hella spectacular. Might cause a lot of fireworks if it happened in the very dense region of a galactic core, possibly a trigger for a quasar starting?

  Parent