Found: three black holes on collision course
Astronomers have spotted three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies. Several observatories, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other NASA space telescopes, captured the unusual system.
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Tau.Neutrino said:
Found: three black holes on collision courseAstronomers have spotted three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies. Several observatories, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other NASA space telescopes, captured the unusual system.
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Very interesting, thanks.
> three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies. We were looking for pairs of active supermassive black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system of three.
> the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope, which scans large swaths of the sky in optical light from New Mexico, imaged SDSS J0849+1114. With the help of citizen scientists participating in a project called Galaxy Zoo, it was then tagged as a system of colliding galaxies.
At last, a practical use for the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. Are there so many galaxies out there that we need citizen scientists to go through and catalogue them? I suppose so.
Adding up the number of telescopes used in this find is quite impressive:
> This may be a solution to a theoretical conundrum called the “final parsec problem,” in which two supermassive black holes can approach to within a few light-years of each other, but would need some extra pull inwards to merge because of the excess energy they carry in their orbits.