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Business News/ News / World/  Unique pair of super-massive blackholes found
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Unique pair of super-massive blackholes found

Finding binary super-massive blackholes can tell astronomers about how galaxies evolved into their present-day shapes and sizes, researchers said

The blackholes were spotted by The European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, because they ripped apart a star when the space observatory happened to be looking in their direction. Photo: AFPPremium
The blackholes were spotted by The European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, because they ripped apart a star when the space observatory happened to be looking in their direction. Photo: AFP

Berlin: Scientists have discovered the first pair of super-massive blackholes in orbit around one another in a non-active galaxy.

The blackholes were spotted by The European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, because they ripped apart a star when the space observatory happened to be looking in their direction. Two super-massive blackholes are the smoking gun that the galaxy has merged with another.

Finding binary super-massive blackholes can tell astronomers about how galaxies evolved into their present-day shapes and sizes, researchers said.

To date, only a few candidates for close binary super-massive blackholes have been found. All are in active galaxies where they are constantly ripping gas clouds apart, in the prelude to crushing them out of existence.

The new discovery, by Fukun Liu, Peking University, Beijing, China, and colleagues, is important because it is the first to be found in a galaxy that is not active.

“There might be a whole population of quiescent galaxies that host binary blackholes in their centres," said co-author Stefanie Komossa, Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany. But finding them is a difficult task because in quiescent galaxies, there are no gas clouds feeding the blackholes, and so the cores of these galaxies are truly dark.

On 10 June 2010, a tidal disruption event was spotted by XMM-Newton in galaxy SDSS J120136. The galaxy was still spilling X-rays into space. The X-rays fell below detectable levels between days 27 and 48 after the discovery. Then they re-appeared and continued to follow a more expected fading rate, as if nothing had happened.

“This is exactly what you would expect from a pair of super-massive blackholes orbiting one another," said Liu.

Liu found that two possible configurations were possible to reproduce the observations of J120136. In the first, the primary blackhole contained 10 million solar masses and was orbited by a blackhole of about a million solar masses in an elliptical orbit. In the second solution, the primary blackhole was about a million solar masses and in a circular orbit. In both cases, the separation between the blackholes was relatively small: 0.6 milliparsecs, or about two thousandths of a light year. This is about the width of our Solar System. Being this close, the fate of this newly discovered blackhole pair is sealed. They will radiate their orbital energy away, gradually spiralling together, until in about two million years time they will merge into a single blackhole.

The finding was published in The Astrophysical Journal. PTI

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Published: 23 Apr 2014, 07:51 PM IST
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