Incredible New Observation Shows Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Each Other

[Judi Lynn]

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Today 3:22pm

- click for image -

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--pc6vJH0C--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/gpzvxeol41jgsz3gnd8t.png


Press release art that doesn’t at all accurately depict what orbiting black holes 24 light years away would look like but does look pretty nice (Image: Joshua Valenzuela/UNM)


You think our galaxy is special? Ha. Our boring pinwheel of gas and dark matter might be a nice hangout for humans. But 750 or so million light years away, there’s an elliptical galaxy, Galaxy 0402+379, whose two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other from a distance of only 24 or so light years. Their combined mass is around 15 billion times that of our Sun.

If you’re not convinced, a team lead by scientists from the University of New Mexico have actually spotted the black holes moving relative to one another using the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of ten radio telescopes across the US, with locations in Hawaii and the Caribbean. Not only is it the first direct measurement of galactic centers orbiting each other like this, but it was a challenging calculation to actually do.

One of the study’s authors, Roger Romani from Stanford University, told Gizmodo “I think, to me it’s a technical tour de force to measure such small motion in the sky,” he said. “It took a dozen years of measurement with the largest telescopic array on earth.”

These black holes are big—probably a few thousand times more massive than the Milky Way’s central monster, Sagittarius A*. They’re likely the result of a whole cluster of galaxies merging together, according to Romani. And while they’re 24 light years apart, that’s actually an incredibly close distance when it comes to orbiting black holes. “Two black holes that close together is pretty exceptional,” he said. Still, it would take around 30,000 years for the behemoths to complete one full orbit. The researchers published these results in The Astrophysical Journal.

More:
http://gizmodo.com/incredible-new-observation-shows-supermassive-black-hol-1796492186

[Me.]

1. But What Does It Mean

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Omigod. The universe has a Rumba.