supermassive black holes 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...

Images of 3 DOG’s. The left, middle, and right panels show optical image from HSC, near-infrared image from VIKING, and mid-infrared image from WISE, respectively. The image size is 20 square arcsecond (1 arcsecond is 1/3600 degree). It is clear that DOGs are faint in the optical, but are extremely bright in the infrared. Credit: Image courtesy of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

As they harbor rapidly growing black holes in their centers, these results give us clues for understanding the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. The research group discovered 48 DOGs, and measured how common they are using Subaru Strategic Program with Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), a new wide-field camera with a field of view 9X the size of the moon.

How did galaxies form and evolve during t...