The picture above is an artist’s conception of the pair of supermassive black holes at the centre of the galaxy 0402+379, 750 million light-years from Earth. Credit: Josh Valenzuela/University of New Mexico.
Astronomers have detected the orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth. The two black holes, with a combined mass 15 billion times that of the Sun, are likely separated by only about 24 light-years, extremely close for such a system.
Astronomers made this discovery using the supersharp radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array. This is considered the first pair of black holes to be seen as separate objects that are moving with respect to each other, and thus makes this the first black-hole ‘visual binary.’”
Supermassive black holes, with millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, reside at the cores of most galaxies. The presence of two such monsters at the center of a single galaxy means that the galaxy merged with another sometime in the past. In such cases, the two black holes themselves may eventually merge in an event that would produce gravitational waves that ripple across the universe.
Click here to read moreAstronomers made this discovery using the supersharp radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array. This is considered the first pair of black holes to be seen as separate objects that are moving with respect to each other, and thus makes this the first black-hole ‘visual binary.’”
Supermassive black holes, with millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, reside at the cores of most galaxies. The presence of two such monsters at the center of a single galaxy means that the galaxy merged with another sometime in the past. In such cases, the two black holes themselves may eventually merge in an event that would produce gravitational waves that ripple across the universe.
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