NASA space telescope finds two pairs of black holes on collision course

(Gray News/TMX) – NASA has released images showing two separate pairs of black holes in colliding dwarf galaxies, according to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Dwarf galaxies are determined by having a total mass of fewer than three billion suns. For comparison, the Milky Way galaxy has a total mass of 60 billion suns.

The researchers said they believe the early universe was full of dwarf galaxies, which eventually merged together to form larger galaxies.

Marko Micic, of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, is the study’s lead author. He said astronomers have found many examples of black holes on collision courses in large galaxies that are relatively close.

“Searches for them in dwarf galaxies are much more challenging and until now had failed,” he said.

The images were captured by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a space telescope launched on board a space shuttle by NASA in 1999. Experts said the material around black holes can reach millions of degrees, producing X-rays and enabling the Chandra X-Ray Observatory to spot them.

Olivia Holmes, also with the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, is the study’s co-author. She said that with the discovery of the first two different pairs of black holes in colliding dwarf galaxies, scientists can use them as analogs for ones in the early universe.

”We can drill down into questions about the first galaxies, their black holes, and star formation the collisions caused,” she said.

One pair of black holes is in the galaxy cluster Abell 133, which is 760 million light-years from Earth.

The second pair is in the Abell 1758S galaxy cluster, which is about 3.2 billion light-years away from Earth.

Researchers have dubbed the merging dwarf galaxies “Elstir” and “Vinteuil” after fictional artists from the novel “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust.

Copyright 2023 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. TMX contributed to this report.