Long Baseline Observatory | National Radio Astronomy Observatory | 2017 Jun 27
VLBA reveals first-ever black-hole "visual binary"
[img3="Artist's conception of the pair of supermassive black holes at theUsing the supersharp radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers have made the first detection of orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth.
center of the galaxy 0402+379, 750 million light-years from Earth.
Credit: Josh Valenzuela/University of New Mexico"]https://public.nrao.edu/wp-content/uplo ... rySMBH.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The two black holes, with a combined mass 15 billion times that of the Sun, are likely separated by only about 24 light-years, extremely close for such a system. ...
Supermassive black holes, with millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, reside at the cores of most galaxies. The presence of two such monsters at the center of a single galaxy means that the galaxy merged with another some time in the past. In such cases, the two black holes themselves may eventually merge in an event that would produce gravitational waves that ripple across the universe. ...
The galaxy, an elliptical galaxy called 0402+379, after its location in the sky, was first observed in 1995. It was studied in 2003 and 2005 with the VLBA. Based on finding two cores in the galaxy, instead of one, Taylor and his collaborators concluded in 2006 that it contained a pair of supermassive black holes. ...
Research Reveals Motion in Orbiting Supermassive Black Holes
Stanford University | 2017 Jun 27
Constraining the Orbit of Supermassive Black Hole Binary 0402+379 - Karishma Bansal et al
- Astrophysical Journal 843(1):14 (01 Jul 2017) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa74e1
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1705.08556 > 23 May 2017