Black holes need love too. Astronomers detected a pair of supermassive black holes 750 million light-years away from Earth in a separate giant galaxy. Courtesy of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array's (VLBA) radio vision, a continent-wide system consisting of 10 radio telescopes, data on the orbital motion of the black holes has been captured.
Together, the two black holes have a combined mass that is 15 billion times the mass of the Sun, which is 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms or 330,000 times the mass of Earth. But most galaxies have supermassive black holes that are millions or billions times larger than the Sun at their core. What makes these two black holes unique is their distance from one another: They're relatively close to each other with only 24 light-years of distance between them.
"The black holes are at a separation of about seven parsecs, which is the closest together that two supermassive black holes have ever been seen before," Karishma Bansal, a graduate student at University of New Mexico (UNM) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. They're friends! Read more...
Together, the two black holes have a combined mass that is 15 billion times the mass of the Sun, which is 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms or 330,000 times the mass of Earth. But most galaxies have supermassive black holes that are millions or billions times larger than the Sun at their core. What makes these two black holes unique is their distance from one another: They're relatively close to each other with only 24 light-years of distance between them.
"The black holes are at a separation of about seven parsecs, which is the closest together that two supermassive black holes have ever been seen before," Karishma Bansal, a graduate student at University of New Mexico (UNM) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. They're friends! Read more...