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We know that our universe is full of black holes, somewhere between the old strange clusters of stars at the mbadive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Now astronomers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich have discovered several pairs of supermbadive black holes located at the center of galaxies which are colliding together.
The scientists were examining what happens when two galaxies merge together into one larger galaxy. The process of collision galaxy, which makes it difficult to see what is happening within. The team used images from the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii and were able to identify two very different galaxies from the original two galaxies. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to find nearby galaxies and galaxies to find peers which were merging. In total, they looked at 385 galaxies from the archive of Hubble images and 96 galaxies from the Keck telescope. Using Hubble images, they were able to identify galaxy NGC 6240, whose two cores have nearly been broken down into the core of the core. Four other merging galaxies were also discovered from the Keck Observatory data, which used near-infrared light and adaptive optics to identify merging galaxies.
Overall, the findings suggest that more than 17% of the galaxies that they studied had a pair of black holes at their center which were spiraling closer and closer together. Eventually, all of these pairs of black holes, which should happen in the next 10 million years. This is the first large-scale systematic survey of 500 galaxies that really isolated these hidden late-stage black holes that are heavily obscured and highly luminous, " lead researcher Dr. Michael Koss told Science News. "It's the first time this population has been discovered. We found a surprising number of supermbadive black holes growing larger and faster in the final stages of galaxy mergers. "
The findings are published in Nature.
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