Markarian 231 tagged posts

OU astrophysicist and his Chinese collaborator used observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope find two supermassive black holes in Markarian 231. Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

The discovery of 2 supermassive black holes – one larger one and a second, smaller one – are evidence of a binary black hole and suggests that supermassive black holes assemble their masses through violent mergers.

Professor Dai and Lu looked at UV radiation emitted from the center of the Mrk 231 from Hubble observations, then applied a model developed by Lu to the spectrum of the galaxy. As a result, they were able to predict the existence of the binary black holes in Mrk 231.

“We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary...