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
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:10AM (1 child)
Why do we hear so much news regarding discoveries about black holes, dark matter, dark energy, (ie things not directly visible to astronomers)? Obviously there are the solar system probes we hear about, but beyond the SS, has anything else interesting been observed recently?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 05 2017, @12:43PM
Beyond the solar system it's pretty hard to see the small stuff.
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