Indian astrophysicists spot rare merger of three jumbo black holes
The Hindu
The study has been published as a letter in the ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics’ journal
A rare merging of three supermassive has been spotted by a team of astrophysicists in India. They were observing the merging of two galaxies named NGC7733 and NGC 7734 in our celestial neighbourhood when they detected unusual emissions from the centre of the latter and a curious movement of a large bright clump within it, having a different velocity than that of NGC7733. Inferring that this was a separate galaxy, the scientists named it NGC7733N. There are supermassive blackholes, which are several million solar masses in size, at the centres of galaxies, and these are known as Active Galactic Nuclei. Since they “accrete“ matter, they often have a glow around them which can be observed using light spectroscopy. All three merging black holes were part of galaxies in the Toucan constellation. They are quite far away when you think that our nearest galactic neighbour – the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. Yet the paper describes these as nearby galaxies. “In Astronomy everything is relative. When we study solar system we say Mercury is closer and Jupiter is far… Compared to our nearest neighbour Andromeda galaxy, the galaxies NGC7733, 7734 and 7733 N are quite far away, but compared to the size of universe they are nearby galaxies,” says Jyoti Yadav, a PhD student at Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the first author of the paper published as a letter in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
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