Pair of supermassive black holes found at centre of galactic collision 300 mln light years away

US astronomers have, using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence in the Earths atmosphere, discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of super-massive black holes at the centre of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

Washington, May 18 : US astronomers have, using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of super-massive black holes at the centre of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

Adaptive optics uses light from a relatively bright star, or guide star, to measure the atmospheric distortions to minimize the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere and produce images with unprecedented detail and resolution.

The two black holes were observed forming at the centre of a rotating disk of stars in the galaxy merger known as NGC 6240, and are surrounded by a cloud of young stars.

Supermassive black holes contain millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun and are believed to exist in the centre of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

For years, astronomers have known that NGC 6240 hosted at least one supermassive black hole. Later observations at NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory confirmed that there were actually two supermassive black holes in the core of NGC 6240.

Now, the new research has confirmed the exact location and environment of the two black holes.

"People had observed this pair of colliding galaxies at different wavelengths and seen what they thought were the black holes, but it's been very hard to make sense of how the observations at various wavelengths correspond to each other," said Claire Max, lead author of the paper in the May 17 issue of Science.

"The adaptive optics results enabled us to tie it all together, so now we can really see it all - the hot dust in the infrared, the stars in the visible and infrared, and the X-rays and radio emissions coming from right around the black holes," he said.

"With the infrared images we got at Keck, we were able to line up the information from all the different wavelengths to determine which features in the images are the black holes," he added.

ANI