Almost all galaxies are known to have a single supermassive black hole at their heart. However, an international team of scientists have recently discovered a bizarre galaxy, which has three supermassive black holes in it’s center.
The new galaxy may help astronomers to decipher the mystery of gravitational waves, the ‘ripples in spacetime’ predicted by Albert Einstein.
The finding, published in the journal Nature, was made by an international team led by Dr Roger Deane from the University of Cape Town. They examined six galactic systems thought to contain two supermassive black holes.
Scientists have discovered that one of them, called SDSS J1502 1115, at a distance of 4 billion years light away, have three supermassive black holes.
This is the tightest “trio” black holes detected at such a large distance, with two of them orbiting each other at just 500 light years apart rather like binary stars.
Astronomers have discovered three closely orbiting supermassive black holes in a galaxy more than 4 billion light years away. Illustrated here are helix-shaped jets from one supermassive black hole caused by its very closely orbiting companion, while the third black hole emits relatively straight jets due to its distance.
(click to zoom)
The discovery was made using a technique called “Very Long Baseline Interferometry” (VLBI). The technique combines the signals captured by several huge radio antennas around the world, separated by up 10,000 km, to see detail 50 times finer than that possible with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Radio signals were captured by European VLBI Network, an arry of European, Chinese, Russian and South African antennas. Future radio telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be able to achive precise measurements of gravitational waves emitted from such black holes systems.
Gravitational waves from cosmic inflation generate a faint but distinctive twisting pattern in the universe. Shown here is the pattern observed with the Bicep2 telescope, providing evidence for cosmic inflation after the Big Bang, although the results have been called into question
Source: https://goo.gl/mqI4zg
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