Pair of Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Galaxy
Matt Gill
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. Within these galaxies are stars, planets, asteroids, supernovae, and even black holes. Black holes are one of the greatest mysteries, and we do not know for sure what happens on the inside.
Scientists estimate that there are around ten million to a billion black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Discovering black holes in the universe is difficult for astronomers and scientists because they don't emit light and no light can escape the event horizon of the black hole. Even though it is hard to find black holes, astronomers still have ways to locate them. Astronomers can locate black holes by the surrounding material around it. They also can locate them by looking at the motion of the stars around them.
The initial idea of black holes began in the 1780s when an English Cleric and John Mitchel, an amateur scientist, showed that Newton's law of gravity could prove that such objects could exist in the universe. But John wanted to go further with the theory and came up with the idea that even though the objects are invisible they could be revealed by the light of a star in its orbit. But this theory was not proven for over a century.
In the 1930s, theorists used Einstein's more complicated theory of gravity also known as general relativity and showed that massive stars can eventually collapse at the end of their lifetime to the force of their own gravity. When the star collapses, theoretically, it would turn into a black hole.
First ever real photo ever taken of a Black hole by a team of Astronomers
In the 1970s, Mitchells claim was confirmed by two British astronomers, Louise Webster and Paul Murdin. These astronomers announced the discovery of a massive, but invisible object in orbit around a blue star more than 6,000 light-years away. This object was named Cygnus x-1 and “is now regarded as the first black hole to be identified,” says Science Focus.
A very important piece of information regarding black holes was recently discovered, and can open up many new ideas and maybe answer questions that astronomers have on the idea of black holes.
This is the image taken of the nearby supermassive black holes. These black holes are the closest pair to ever exist.
On November 30th, an article on NewScientist by Leah Crane came out about the closest pair of supermassive black holes to the earth that we have ever discovered. The pair of black holes is 89 million light-years away from Earth, discovered by The Very Large Telescope facility in Chile. The larger black hole of the two has a mass of 154 million times the sun, and the smaller one has about 6.3 million solar masses. The larger black hole sits at the center of the NGC 7727 universe, and the smaller black hole is 1,600 light-years to the side and most likely belonged to a different galaxy but was swallowed by NGC 7727 billions of years ago. These black holes were spotted by the strangely fast movements of the nearby stars around them. Now, these black holes are on course for collision and are estimated to collide in about 250 million years. “These processes in astronomy take billions of years, so we can’t follow them as they happen, but we’ve caught this in the act of the merging process,” says Voggel.
In our billions of galaxies, there are black holes everywhere and way more that we can’t see or haven't discovered yet. And throughout the years we have gone from a simple theory to general relativity, to a much greater understanding of the universe and how it operates. The discovery of two colliding supermassive black holes closer than ever before is very important for mankind because we can study the pairs in many ways and can answer some questions we may have about Black holes.
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