Black Hole BANQUET! Scientists discover two supermassive black holes feeding side-by-side, just 750 light-years apart
- Two supermassive black holes have been discovered eating side by side
- The pair grow simultaneously only 750 light-years apart
- Astronomers believe they will eventually combine to form a gigantic black hole
A black hole is amazing enough—a region of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape it.
Now, astronomers have uncovered something even more remarkable, as two black holes were spotted eating side-by-side.
The pair will grow simultaneously just 750 light-years apart — the closest scientists have ever observed — and will eventually coalesce to form a gigantic black hole.
They were discovered by researchers using the ALMA telescope, the most powerful telescope for observing molecular gas and dust, located in the Atacama Desert.
A black hole is amazing enough—a region of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Now, astronomers have uncovered something even more remarkable, as two black holes were spotted eating side-by-side
When the team looked 500 million light-years from Earth at two galaxies merging in the constellation of Cancer, they saw something they “didn’t expect”.
They spotted two glowing black holes banqueting the dust, gas and other materials displaced by the merger.
Although the black holes are cosmologically close to each other, they will not merge for several hundred million years.
Eventually they will begin to orbit each other, narrowing the orbit as gas and stars pass between them.
The pair will grow simultaneously just 750 light-years apart — the closest scientists have ever observed — and will eventually coalesce to form a gigantic black hole
Eventually, the black holes will start producing gravitational waves far more powerful than any previously detected, the researchers said, before colliding and forming a giant black hole.
The results also suggest that binary black holes and the merging galaxies that produce them are actually surprisingly common in the universe.
Experts said using ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array, is a “game changer” and that finding two black holes so close together could pave the way for additional studies of the phenomenon.
Michael Koss, lead author of the study, is from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
He said: “ALMA is unique in that it can see through large columns of gas and dust and achieves very high spatial resolution to see things very close together.
“Our study has identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a galaxy merger, and since we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in the distant universe, these black hole binary systems could also be much more common than previously thought.”
The results of the new research were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington.
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BLACK HOLES HAVE SO STRONG gravitational force that even light cannot escape
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull so strong that no radiation – not even light – can escape.
They act as intense gravitational wells, sucking up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is believed to be what orbits stars in galaxies.
Little is known about how they arise. Astronomers believe they could be formed when a large cloud of gas, up to 100,000 times larger than the Sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge into much larger supermassive black holes found at the center of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole could originate from a giant star about 100 times the mass of the Sun that eventually forms into a black hole after running out of fuel and collapsing.
When these giant stars die, they also go into a “supernova,” a giant explosion that ejects matter from the star’s outer layers into space.