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aristarchus writes:

Among other places, at Vice.

It's wild enough when two supermassive black holes collide, but scientists have now spotted an extremely rare triple hole smash-up.

The impending collision is occurring one billion light years away in a system called SDSS J0849+1114, which is a merger of three galaxies, according to NASA.

Scientists led by Ryan Pfeifle, an astrophysicist at George Mason University, identified the epic event while hunting for galaxy mergers, which occur when two galaxies collide and evolve into a unified system. Big galaxies host supermassive black holes in their centers, so a galactic merger may lead to a collision of gigantic black holes, as well.

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole known to scientists, and can grow to be millions or even billions of times as massive as the Sun. When galaxies collide, their central black holes emit radiation as they consume stars, gas, and dust from the merger. (While light cannot escape a black hole once it has passed the event horizon, tidal forces at the outside edge of black holes heats up matter, making it visible to telescopes).

[...]Citizen scientists working on Galaxy Zoo, a project that allows users to help categorize galaxies in sky surveys, classified the system as a galactic merger using optical light images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope in New Mexico.

Other coverage:

• https://www.space.com/three-supermassive-black-holes-collision-discovery-photo-video.html
• https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/found-three-black-holes-on-collision-course.html
• https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1183036/Black-hole-collisions-three-supermassive-black-holes-crash-NASA-Chandra

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