Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course - by spacewriter
“Astronomers have found many examples of black holes on collision courses in large galaxies that are relatively close by,” said Marko Micic of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. He led a new study that looked for evidence of such mergers in faraway galaxies. “But searches for them in dwarf galaxies are much more challenging and until now had failed.”To understand what actually happened “back then”, Micic and his team observed dwarf galaxy collisions in regions closer to home.
Evidence for two pairs of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies on collision courses has been found with Chandra. The two pairs are shown in X-rays from Chandra and optical light from the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. The merger on the left is in a late stage; the other merger is in the early stages. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Micic et al.
The Milky Way, for example, is still cannibalizing dwarf galaxies today, some 13.6 billion years after it first began to form. Currently, astronomers know that about 50 dwarfs surround the Milky Way. Our galaxy is ingesting some of them, like the Sagittarius Dwarf.
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