Miniscule Measurements Over 12 Years Confirm The Existence Of Orbiting Black Holes
In a ground-breaking study over ten years in the making, scientists have observed two supermassive black holes orbiting each other hundreds of millions of light years from Earth.
“For a long time, we’ve been looking into space to try and find a pair of these supermassive black holes orbiting as a result of two galaxies merging,” said University of New Mexico professor Greg Taylor in a statement.
“Even though we’ve theorized that this should be happening, nobody had ever seen it until now.”
Lying approximately 750 million light years from Earth at the centre of an amalgamation of ancient galaxies lie two of the largest black holes ever found, with a combined mass that’s 15 billion times that of the Sun.
Taylor worked with lead author and graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Karishma Bansal, along with colleagues at Stanford, the US Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory to study the interaction between these two supermassive black holes for 12 years. They were searching for the smallest of motions that would indicate that the pair were moving in relation to each other.
“If you imagine a snail on the recently discovered Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri – a bit over four light years away – moving at one centimeter a second, that’s the angular motion we’re resolving here,” said Roger W. Romani, professor of physics at Stanford and co-author of the paper, in another statement.
That makes this not only the first pair of black holes to be shown moving in relation to each other, but also the smallest ever recorded movement of an object across the sky.
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