Twin Black Holes Eating the Leftovers of the Galaxy

Thursday, 12 January 2023 – 15:02 WIB

LIVE Techno – Two black hole have been found chewing material adjoining the hearts of two galaxy that coalesce, indicating that binary black holes may be more common than scientists thought.

The researchers report the findings Jan. 9 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, held in Seattle.

They found the destroying duo at UGC 4211, a galaxy 500 million light years away in the constellation Cancer, which is the result of the merger of two separate galaxies.

UGC 4211 is in the final stages of this merge. Maybe one day the galaxy Milky Way we will experience a similar collision with the nearby Andromeda galaxy, according to the Live Science website, Thursday, January 12, 2023.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of telescopes capable of peering through clouds of dust and gas into the very distant heart of a galaxy, researchers found that this galaxy is anchored at its center by not one, but two supermassive black holes.

“Our study has identified one of the closest black hole pairs in galaxy mergers, and because we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in distant universes, these black hole binaries may also be much more common than previously thought,” said lead author Michael. Koss.

This finding has implications for something discovered when astronomers probe the universe for gravitational waves. Ripples in space-time are caused by dramatic processes such as black holes colliding with each other.

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“There may be many pairs of supermassive black holes growing at the center of galaxies that we have not been able to identify so far. If so, in the near future we will observe frequent gravitational wave events caused by merging objects throughout the universe,” said the study authors. Ezequiel Treister.