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Hubble finds two black holes orbiting each other in a quasar

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a quasar that is being kept alive by two supermassive black holes. What makes this an even better find, is that the two black holes are rotating around each other.

“The finding suggests that quasars – the brilliant cores of active galaxies – may commonly host two central supermassive black holes, which fall into orbit about one another as a result of the merger between two galaxies,” Nasa explains.

Quasars are a type of galactic core around which stars orbit which appear as bright objects due to the concentrations of matter and and energy they contain. Up until now, it was believed that quasars formed around supermassive black holes, but this finding may change that according to Nasa.

This discovery was made about Markarian 231 (Mrk 231), the nearest galaxy to Earth that hosts a quasar.

“If only one black hole were present in the centre of the quasar, the whole accretion disk made of surrounding hot gas would glow in ultraviolet rays. Instead, the ultraviolet glow of the dusty disk abruptly drops off toward the centre. This provides observational evidence that the disk has a big donut hole encircling the central black hole. The best explanation for the donut hole in the disk, based on dynamical models, is that the center of the disk is carved out by the action of two black holes orbiting each other. The second, smaller black hole orbits in the inner edge of the accretion disk, and has its own mini-disk with an ultraviolet glow,” Nasa said.

Things in space are pretty big, but how big are these two suckers? Well, it is estimated that the central black hole is around 150 million times the mass of our sun and the smaller on is around 4 million solar masses.

For something that heavy, they move pretty quickly. Nasa estimates that the two black holes orbit around each other every 1.2 years.

“We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary black hole in Mrk 231, but also paves a new way to systematically search binary black holes via the nature of their ultraviolet light emission,” said Youjun Lu of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

[Image – Nasa]

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