Rare trio of supermassive black holes found

Where two distant galaxies collide, three supermassive black holes engage in a gravitational dance. Two of the black holes embrace in a tight orbit, spinning out jets of gas, while the third waits off to the side. Observations of the trio demonstrate that swirling jets can help astronomers find hidden black hole pairs. The finding also suggests that these pairs may be more common than previously thought.

Every large galaxy appears to harbor a central supermassive black hole, a pileup of the corpses of huge stars. These black holes, which can weigh well over a billion suns, appear to build up over time from collisions between galaxies. As two galaxies merge, their central black holes find one another, spiral together and eventually combine into one giant black hole.

Roger Deane, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and colleagues stumbled upon the black hole trio while studying galaxies that emit a lot of radio light. The researchers knew of a galaxy that holds two black holes, which were first discovered three years ago and are separated by about 24,000 light-years. What Deane’s team figured out is that one of those black holes is actually two black holes, crowded together at just 450 light-years apart, the team reports June 25 in Nature.

To distinguish between the two close-together black holes, Deane’s team used the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network. When used together, EVN’s 18 telescopes, spread around the world, behave like a powerful antenna with roughly the diameter of Earth. The network provides astronomers with the resolution needed to pick out the separate blasts of radio waves from two black holes hundreds of light-years apart in a galaxy nearly 5 billion light-years away.

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Edit: Related:
Black hole trio discovery may explain Einstein's theory

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Last Edited by Face Palmer on 06/26/2014 09:10 AM