Jakarta, Gatra.com- Imagine if two people fought endlessly for 3 billion years, they would both be battered. However, if two black holes duel (black hole) then the two would be stuck in a dance for billions of years. That’s what astronomers discovered about the heaviest pair of black holes in the universe. Thereby Live Science05/03.
Two supermassive black holes seen swirling inside a remote ‘fossil’ galaxy are the heaviest and closest binary black holes ever discovered.
Astronomers have spotted the heaviest pair of black holes ever seen – both weighing the equivalent of 28 billion suns. The combined mass of the black holes is so large that they refuse to collide and merge. The two dueled endlessly for 3 billion years.
The binary black hole embedded in the “fossil” galaxy B2 0402+379, consists of two giant supermassive black holes rotating around each other just 24 light years away, making it the closest pair of black holes ever seen.
Despite their close proximity, these twin monsters are trapped in orbital limbo: no longer able to get close to each other, they have continued to repeat the same dance for more than 3 billion years. Astronomers are still unsure whether the ballet of black holes will continue without a break or end in a spectacular collision. The researchers reported their findings on January 5 at Astrophysical Journal.
“Typically galaxies with lighter black hole pairs have enough stars and mass to bring them together quickly,” said co-author Roger Romani, a physics professor at Stanford University, in a statement.
“Because this pair is so heavy, it needs a lot of stars and gas to get the job done. “But the binary had explored the galactic center of the material, so it stopped,” he added.
Black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by devouring anything that gets too close – be it gas, dust, stars or other black holes. But where the first black holes came from is still a mystery.
Past simulations of the “cosmic dawn” – the first billion years of the universe – show that black holes were born from billowing clouds of cold gas and dust that coalesced into stars so massive they were destined to rapidly collapse. After birth, these black holes grew larger, trailing the gas around them to eventually collapse into the first stars in the dwarf galaxy.
Astronomers theorize that as the universe expanded, black holes within these dwarf galaxies quickly merged with other galaxies to produce larger supermassive black holes – and with them, even larger galaxies.
To find a pair of black holes that are close to merging, astronomers scoured archives of data collected by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Using the telescope’s spectrograph (called GMOS) to break up the light from the star into different colors, the scientists discovered the light coming from the sun was moving rapidly around the black hole.
This led astronomers to B2 0402+379 – a “fossil cluster” that formed when an entire galaxy cluster of stars and gas combined into one giant galaxy.
“GMOS’s excellent sensitivity allows us to map the increase in stellar velocities as one looks closer to the center of the galaxy,” Romani said. With that, we can deduce the total mass of the black hole located there.
Black holes in merging galaxies are thought to merge by entering orbit around each other and eventually drawing closer together as their dance loses angular momentum by accelerating nearby stars.
When the pair gets close enough, scientists believe that gravitational waves – distortions of space-time produced by the spin of a black hole – carry enough energy to make the dueling monsters slow down and merge.
But scientists have never observed two black holes doing this, and the merger of black hole B2 0402+379 has been stalled for the past 3 billion years – a consequence, researchers believe, of a pair of giant black holes so massive that nothing could able to do it. to slow them down.
“We look forward to follow-up investigations of the core of B2 0402+379 where we will see how much gas is present,” lead author Tirth Surti, a physics student at Stanford, said in a statement. “This will give us more insight into whether supermassive black holes can eventually merge or remain stranded as binaries.”
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2024-03-04 21:11:17
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