Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:03PM (#577687)
    What is a gravitational wave? It's a periodic rippling of the fabric of spacetime itself. That's the mechanism. It will cause objects to stretch and shrink as the wave propagates by an amount determined by the wave's amplitude. As the wave propagates through the universe the amplitude goes down and very far away we only get the tiny amplitude that required the sensitivity of LIGO to detect. However, very close to the merger the amplitudes of the waves are much higher, and well, even if they were high enough to cause you to stretch and shrink by even a few centimetres I imagine that might already be lethal to a human.