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Through a standard telescope, the nearby galaxy NGC 7727 looks like a jossum floating in the night sky. But inside, two supermassive black holes begin a dance that ends with their violent merging. A team of astronomers recently discovered that these objects are closer to Earth than any other supermassive pair.
One of the black holes has a mass of 6.3 million times the mass of the Sun, and the second has a mass of 154 million solar masses. The duo is located 89 million light years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. The team determined the masses of objects by studying how their gravity affects surrounding stars.
The supermassive black hole lies at the center of the galaxy – our galaxy hosts Sagittarius A*, which is about 4 million solar masses away from the black hole 26,000 light-years from Earth. When two galaxies merge, the black holes eventually orbit each other and eventually merge. Black hole mergers are some of the most violent astrophysical phenomena in the universe, and they produce the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein and others. first observed by Gravity Wave Laser Interferometer (LIGO) in 2015.
Nearby NGC 7727 blew up the previous record-holding pair from interstellar waters – this pair is 470 million light-years from us. Team research is group for publishing in astronomy and astrophysics.
“Once the black holes approach each other, they will be gravitationally bound and orbit each other,” said study lead author Karina Vogel. In an email to Gizmodo. “This is theoretically observable, but this stage in the evolution of black holes lasts only a short time on the cosmic timescale, and so far we haven’t observed it.” Vogel, An astronomer at the University of Strasbourg in France, He said The effect of merging unknown galaxies like this can increase the number of supermassive black holes by up to 30%.
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“at the moment, LIGO can detect gravitational wave events from merging black holes that are twice as large as our sun,” added Vogel. Lisa’s space mission It will be online in a few years, We will also be able to detect gravitational wave events from merging such supermassive black holes.”
While galaxies are visible through ordinary telescopes, when viewed through the Southern European Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, one can draw small celestial bodies of light within the galaxy that mark where the black hole is. (Black holes’ gravity is so strong that light is known to be unable to escape from it, but objects are often surrounded by extremely hot plasma that glows brightly.)
Study author Holger Baumgardt, an astrophysicist at the University of Queensland, Australia, said at ESO release.
Black hole astronomy will get a boost, as the Very Large Black Hole Telescope will replace the Very Large Telescope by the end of the decade. The new telescope will be located high up in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a place of interest to astronomers for its altitude, clear skies and lack of light pollution.
“The detection of this pair of supermassive black holes is just the beginning,” co-author Steffen Mieske, an astronomer at ESO in Chile, said in the same release. “We will be able to make discoveries like this far beyond what is currently possible. ESO ELT will be an integral part of understanding these things.”
Modern gravitational wave observatories can detect ripples in space-time caused by colliding black holes as well as black holes and neutron stars. But we probably won’t get a chance to finally see the pair cuddle, as the researchers’ best guess for the date of their merger is simply “within the next 250 million years,” according to Baumgart.
This article has been updated to include comments from Karina Voggel.
More: Physicists see light echo from behind a black hole for the first time
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