Astronomers find black holes using two rolling
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Astronomers in a galaxy far discovered two black holes at small distance and high speed spin around each other. The double black hole is located over four billion light years away in the constellation Slang.
The discovery supports the theory that large galaxies formed by the fusion of smaller ones.
Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, studied the spectra of 17,500 quasars in the archives of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies with super-heavy black holes in the center. Their high energy radiation is produced by hot gas at the point in the black hole to disappear.
The spectroscopic observations of the quasar J1536 0441 reveals that two massive black holes are at stake, 800 million and 20 million times as heavy as the Sunday About once a century, turning them around each other at a distance of about three trillion kilometers, with a speed of 6000 kilometers per second. The discovery is published Thursday in Nature.
The existence of double black holes predicted by current theory that small galaxies in the course of time in conflict with one another and merge to larger systems. Eventually the two black holes with each other into a giant one. In the case of J1536 0441 can still be a few billion years.
Source: Volkskrant
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Astronomers in a galaxy far discovered two black holes at small distance and high speed spin around each other. The double black hole is located over four billion light years away in the constellation Slang.
The discovery supports the theory that large galaxies formed by the fusion of smaller ones.
Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, studied the spectra of 17,500 quasars in the archives of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies with super-heavy black holes in the center. Their high energy radiation is produced by hot gas at the point in the black hole to disappear.
The spectroscopic observations of the quasar J1536 0441 reveals that two massive black holes are at stake, 800 million and 20 million times as heavy as the Sunday About once a century, turning them around each other at a distance of about three trillion kilometers, with a speed of 6000 kilometers per second. The discovery is published Thursday in Nature.
The existence of double black holes predicted by current theory that small galaxies in the course of time in conflict with one another and merge to larger systems. Eventually the two black holes with each other into a giant one. In the case of J1536 0441 can still be a few billion years.
Source: Volkskrant