Three supermassive black holes discovered in a single galaxy for the first time
An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has identified three actively accreting supermassive black holes in the galaxy J0148-4214. Matter is falling into the black holes from accretion disks surrounding them.
An international team of astronomers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has made a groundbreaking discovery: three supermassive black holes residing within a single galaxy, J0148-4214, located over 12.5 billion light-years away. This marks the first time scientists have observed such a phenomenon in the distant universe.
The study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveals that the galaxy, seen as it was only about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, presents a redshift of z = 5.02, indicating its immense distance from Earth.
Two of the black holes are situated in the galactic center, separated by just 620 light-years, while the third is located in the outer region, approximately 5,500 light-years away from the center. The massive black holes are actively accreting matter from surrounding accretion disks, with the most massive black hole having a mass of around 80 million solar masses and the others being 0.6 million and 2 million solar masses respectively.
Researchers identified these black holes through their spectral fingerprints, specifically the signatures of high-velocity hydrogen atoms orbiting the black holes. The complex structure of the central region's spectrum suggested the presence of two black holes in close proximity. By employing spectro-astrometry, a technique that measures precise spatial shifts, the team was able to pinpoint the locations of the black holes, despite them not being distinguishable as separate point sources.
The findings, led by Hannah Übler, suggest that the early universe may have been efficient at clustering massive black holes together, potentially paving the way for the colossal black hole mergers expected to be detected by future gravitational wave observatories. These observations also offer valuable insights into galaxy evolution and black hole growth theories, indicating that black hole mergers could be a rapid mechanism for their rapid growth in the early universe.
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