Astrophysicists have recorded the convergence of two supermassive black holes
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- Astrophysicists have recorded the convergence of two supermassive black holes
Astronomers have discovered in the Markarian 501 galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other and moving towards an inevitable merger. According to calculations by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, a collision could occur in 100 years. This is reported by Science Focus magazine.
"Realizing that this was the second jet was amazing. For me, it was like, is this how it works? I was so amazed and excited, and I wanted to tell everyone about what we had just found," said Silke Britzen, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Scientists have identified a pair of black holes by analyzing long-term data from radio telescope observations of the galaxy. Unlike most galaxies, in the core of which only one jet is formed — a narrowly directed stream of charged particles escaping from the center — in Markarian 501, researchers have recorded two such streams. Each of them, according to the authors, is powered by a separate black hole with a mass of 100 million to billion solar masses.
The two objects orbit each other approximately every 121 days. The distance between them ranges from 250 to 540 distances from the Earth to the Sun, which is negligible by the standards of bodies of such a colossal mass. In June 2022, the geometry of the system aligned so that the light of one of the jets was bent by the gravity of the second black hole, forming the so—called "Einstein ring" - a rare optical phenomenon that became additional evidence of the binary nature of the system.
"The binary model provides a self-consistent solution. Since these jets are pointing in our direction, the Einstein ring confirms the scenario," Britzen stressed.
When the black holes finally merge, the collision will generate gravitational waves that are many times more powerful than those previously recorded by detectors like LIGO during mergers of stellar-mass black holes. These waves will spread throughout the universe.
On March 25, the Science X news portal reported on the possible existence of primordial black holes. According to the researchers, theoretically they could have formed immediately after the Big Bang, but until now they remained hypothetical objects. If confirmed, their existence will help explain many cosmological mysteries, including the nature of dark matter, which makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe.
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