Space might be the final frontier, but as with most things right now, science and our ability to see farther and clearer than ever before are seeing mysteries solved.
And while scientists might not fully understand black holes, they are able to gather tons of data when watching a bunch of them crash into each other from afar.
Astronomers have been using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to keep an eye on two merging dwarf galaxies that are 760 million and 3.2 billion light years away.
A new Chandra study has tracked 2 pairs of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies on collision courses. This is the first evidence for such an impending encounter, providing important information about the growth of black holes in the early Universe: https://t.co/BL8VtUYd5D pic.twitter.com/eoTYrLNChc
— Chandra Observatory (@chandraxray) February 22, 2023
They published their findings in The Astrophysical Journals, and claim this is the first evidence in merging dwarf galaxies.
“Astronomers have found many examples of black holes on collision courses in large galaxies that are relatively close by. But searches for them in dwarf galaxies are much more challenging and until now had failed.”
Dwarf galaxies are super important as far as understanding the evolution of galaxies as a whole. Cosmologists believe that many dwarf galaxies have merged over time, eventually merging to form the large ones we see today.
“Most of the dwarf galaxies and black holes in the early universe are likely to have grown much larger by now, thanks to repeated mergers. In some ways, dwarf galaxies are our galactic ancestors, which have evolved over billions of years to produce large galaxies like our own Milky Way.”
That said, they’re still hard to study.
That’s why watching these four black holes merging is so exciting, and why scientists are sure to keep coming back to these to make more observations and to draw conclusions for years to come.
Yay science!