Astronomers have discovered a cosmic smash-up just waiting to happen in a giant object just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
. The two black holes fall towards each other, eventually – we think – merging to form one very large supermassive black hole.But these mergers are a bit harder to spot in the early Universe. The light from J0749+2255 has traveled for more than 10 billion years to reach us; what we see of the galaxy is quite small and dim compared to the stuff that's a lot closer to us.
A faint variation in the light from J0749+2255 detected by the Gaia telescope suggested that there might be something more going on with the galaxy than was immediately apparent… but there were multiple possible causes, of which double quasar was one. The team had to dig a lot deeper to find out what was really happening.
"The confirmation process wasn't easy, and we needed an array of telescopes covering the spectrum from X-rays to the radio to finally confirm that this system is indeed a pair of quasars, instead of, say, two images of a gravitationally lensed quasar,"And J0749+2255 is special. Since both the black holes are quasars, they shine brightly enough to be able to distinguish.
Using observations from a whole slew of ground- and space-based telescopes, Chen and his colleagues analyzed the light from J0749+2255. They determined that the two black holes will likely evolve into a gravitationally bound tight binary in around 220 million years or so. The decaying orbit of this binary will eventually lead to a collision and merger into an even more massive black hole.
Researchers also found that the two black holes are relative chonkers, clocking in at around 1.26 billion solar masses and 1.58 billion solar masses, respectively. These findings could start to tell us something about the rate of binary supermassive black holes in the early Universe – which would help astronomers understand the evolution of recent black holes that can be
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