A pair of black holes are dining together in a nearby galaxy merger.
Two supermassive black holes are present in a nearby galaxy merger, and they look to be the nearest pair ever found at different wavelengths, according to a new study.
According to the research team, while studying a nearby pair of merging galaxies, scientists have discovered two supermassive black holes growing simultaneously near the centre of the newly coalescing galaxy.
"These super-hungry giants are the closest together that scientists have ever observed at multiple wavelengths. What's more, the new research reveals that binary black holes and the galaxy mergers that create them may be surprisingly commonplace in the universe.
These black holes were discovered using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international observatory in Chile.
The discovery was announced on January 9 at the 241st American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle and in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The two galaxies, collectively known as UGC 4211, are in the last stages of merging and are only 500 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer.
"Simulations suggested that most of the population of black hole binaries in nearby galaxies would be inactive because they are more common, not two growing black holes like we found," said Michael Koss, a senior research scientist at Eureka Scientific and the lead author of the new research.
Scientist Koss added that the use of ALMA was a game-changer, and that finding two black holes so close together in the nearby Universe could pave the way for additional studies of the exciting phenomenon.
"ALMA is unique in that it can see through large columns of gas and dust and achieve very high spatial resolution to see things very close together. Our study has identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a galaxy merger, and because we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in the distant Universe, these black hole binaries too may be much more common than previously thought."