Rare merger of three supermassive black holes spotted by Indian Astrophysicists

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 also a curious movement of a large bright clump having a different velocity than that of NGC7733. Inferring that this was a separate galaxy, the scientists named it NGC7733N. This study, published as a letter in the journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics’ used data from the Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard the first Indian space observatory ASTROSAT, the European integral field optical telescope called MUSE mounted on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and infrared images from the optical telescope (IRSF) in South Africa.