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Two supermassive black holes have been spotted feasting on cosmic matter as two galaxies merge in distant space — and are the closest colliding black holes astronomers have ever observed.
Astronomers teamed up with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array telescopes, or ALMA, in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert to observe two merging galaxies about 500 million light-years from Earth.
Two black holes eventually grew near the center of the merging galaxy from the merger. Galaxies such as UGC 4211 flocked to meet with their host.
One is a hundred million times the mass of our sun, the other is a million times the mass of the sun.
While the black holes themselves are not directly visible, both glomeruli of stars are surrounded by bright, hot gas—all of which are drawn out by the holes’ gravity.
Over time, they will start orbiting each other, eventually colliding into each other and creating a single black hole.
After observing them through multiple wavelengths of light, the black holes were determined to be the most closely related to any science they’ve ever seen — only about 750 light-years apart, which is relatively close, astronomically speaking.
The results were shared at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society held this week in Seattle and were published Monday in the journal Astrophysical Letters.
The distance between black holes is “quite close to the limit we can detect, which is why this is so exciting,” said study coauthor Chiara Mingarelli, an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. in the constitution.
Galactic mergers are more common in the distant universe, which makes it more difficult for users of ground-based telescopes. The ALMA sensor was also able to observe their active galactic nuclei – the bright, compact regions in galaxies where matter orbits around black holes. Astronomers have been surprised to see two black hole binaries, rather than one black hole, feasting on gas and dust stirred up by a galactic merger.
“Our study identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a merging galaxy, and because we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in the distant universe, these binary black holes may be even more common than previously thought,” he said. study author Michael Koss, senior research scientist at the Eureka Scientific Research Institute in Oakland, California, said in a statement.
“What we just studied is the source in the very last stage of the collision, which is where we saw those merger predictions and we also see the connection between black holes merging and growing and eventually producing gravitational waves,” Koss said. .
If pairs of black holes — and the galaxies that lead to their creation — are more common in the universe than previously thought, they could have implications for future gravitational wave research. Gravitational waves, or waves in space-time, occur when black holes collide.
It will still take a few hundred million years for this unique pair of black holes to collide, but the insights gained from this observation will allow scientists to better estimate how many pairs of black holes are close to colliding in the universe.
“There are many pairs of supermassive holes growing in the centers of galaxies that we just couldn’t identify,” said study co-author Ezequiel Treister, an astronomer at the Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. edition “If this is the case, in the near future we will observe frequent gravitational wave events from the merging of these objects across the Universe.”
Space-based telescopes such as the Hubble and Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes such as the European Southern Observatory’s largest telescope, also in the Atacama Desert and the WM Keck telescope in Hawaii have also observed UGC 4211 through different wavelengths of light to provide a more accurate recognition and the difference between the two holes black
“Every murder tells a different story,” Treister said. “All these data together gave us a clearer picture of how galaxies like ours are and what they will be like in the future.”
Understanding more about the stages of galaxy mergers may lead to a better understanding of what will happen when our Milky Way galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.
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