The two bright galactic nuclei, each housing a supermassive black hole, are shown in this image in close up and wide view. Each nucleus has a dense group of stars with a black hole at its centre. Two black holes are on a collision course and form the closest pair of black holes to date. The pair with the smallest separation between two black holes was observed to be just 1600 light-years apart in the sky. The left and right images were taken with the MUSE instrument on the VLT at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The credit is given to the team of the ESO/VST ATLAS. The Durham University/CASU/WFAU has been acknowledged.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope have found the closest pair of black holes to Earth. The two objects have a smaller separation than any other previously spotted pair of black holes and will eventually merge into one giant black hole.
Voggel and her team were able to determine the mass of the two objects by looking at how the black holes affect the motion of the stars around them. The black hole at the center of the system has a mass that is 154 million times that of the Sun.
This is the first time the mass has been measured in this way for a black hole. Thanks to the close proximity of the system to Earth and the detailed observations the team obtained at the Paranal Observatory in Chile using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), Voggel was able to achieve this feat. The team was able to confirm that the objects were supermassive black holes by using additional data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Since we don't see large amounts of high-energy radiation coming from their immediate surroundings, Astronomers suspected that the two black holes were in the galaxy. Voggel believes that there may be many more relics of galaxy mergers out there and they may contain hidden massive black holes. It could increase the number of black holes by 30 percent.
The search for hidden supermassive black hole pairs is expected to get a huge boost with the launch of the ELT. "This detection of a black hole pair is just the beginning," says co-author Steffen Mieske. We will be able to make detections like this considerably further than we currently can with the HARMONI instrument. The ELT will be an important part of understanding these objects.
The paper "First Direct Dynamical Detection of a dual Super-Massive Black Hole System at sub-kpc Separation" was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Voggel et al., first direct dynamical detection of a dual super-massive black hole system at sub-kpc separation, Astronomy & Astrophysics. There is a book titled "1051/0004-6361/202140827".
The journal has information about astronomy and astrophysics.
The Very Large Telescope has uncovered the closest pair of black holes yet.
The document is copyrighted. Any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research cannot be reproduced without written permission. The content is not intended to be used for anything other than information purposes.
