Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
The group of astronomers found two black holes or supermassive black holes floating in the night sky. Findings of black holes were captured using only standard telescopes.
The hole is near the galaxy NGC 7727. Both black holes hover in the night sky. Inside are two supermassive black holes that are starting to move and are said to end up colliding.
As a team of astronomers recently discovered, these two celestial objects are closer to Earth than any other supermassive pair.
One of the black holes is 6.3 million times the mass of the Sun, while the other is 154 million solar masses. Both are 89 million light years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.
The team determined the object’s mass by studying how its gravitational pull affects surrounding stars.
When two galaxies are about to merge, the black holes will circle around each other and eventually merge on their own.
These black hole mergers are some of the most violent astrophysical phenomena in the universe, and they produce the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein, first observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015.
The proximity of the two black holes to the galaxy NGC 7727 sent the previous record-holding pair out of interstellar water, which is a pair of holes 470 million light-years from Earth.
The astronaut team’s research will be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“Once the black holes get closer to each other, they become gravitationally bound and orbit each other,” said study lead author Karina Voggel. Gizmodo.
“This is theoretically observable, but this stage in the evolution of black holes only lasts a short time on the cosmic timescale, and so far we haven’t observed it.”
Voggel, an astronomer at the University of Strasbourg, France, said that such remnants of merging unknown galaxies could increase the number of supermassive black holes by up to 30 percent.
“Currently, LIGO can detect gravitational wave events from black holes merging and having masses several times that of our Sun,” said Voggel.
Voggel said that while the space mission by the LISA consortium will run in a few years, the team will also detect gravitational wave events from the merger of these supermassive black holes.
When viewed through the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, one can see small balls of light inside the galaxy that mark where black holes are located.
Astronomers say black holes will get a boost, as ESO’s massive telescope will be replaced by a very large one by the end of the decade. The new telescope will be in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a suitable place for observation due to its good altitude, clear skies, and lack of light pollution.
“The detection of this supermassive black hole pair is just the beginning,” said co-author Steffen Mieske Scitech Daily.
Modern gravitational wave observatories are capable of detecting waves in space-time created by the collision of black holes and black holes and neutron stars.
But we probably won’t get a chance to see these two holes finally collide, because according to the researchers the time they collided is predicted to occur within the next 250 million years.
(can/fjr)
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