University of Hertfordshire | Royal Astronomical Society | 2018 Oct 24
New research has found evidence for a large number of double supermassive black holes, likely precursors of gigantic black hole merging events.
5 GHz radio map of 3C 334. The jet emanates from the nucleus of a galaxy (its
stars are not visible at radio frequencies) about 10 billion light years from our own.
The peculiar structure of the jets signifies a periodic change of the direction of
the jet (precession), an effect that is predicted for jets from black hole pairs.
Credit: M. Krause / University of Hertfordshire.
This confirms the current understanding of cosmological evolution - that galaxies and their associated black holes merge over time, forming bigger and bigger galaxies and black holes.
Astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire, together with an international team of scientists, have looked at radio maps of powerful jet sources and found signs that would usually be present when looking at black holes that are closely orbiting each other.
Before black holes merge they form a binary black hole, where the two black holes orbit around each other. Gravitational-wave telescopes have been able to evidence the merging of smaller black holes since 2015, by measuring the strong burst of gravitational waves that are emitted when binary black holes merge, but current technology cannot be used to demonstrate the presence of supermassive binary black holes. ...
How Frequent Are Close Supermassive Binary Black Holes in Powerful Jet Sources? ~ M.G.H. Krause et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 482(1):240 (Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2558
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1809.04050 > 11 Sep 2018