Adaptive optics pinpoints 2 supermassive black holes in colliding galaxies

[cro-man]

An adaptive optics image of the double nucleus of the galaxy merger NGC 6240, taken in infrared light with the Keck II Telescope. The feature within the north nucleus labeled "North 2" is at the position of the northern supermassive black hole. The southern supermassive black hole is located just north (above) the feature labeled "South 1" in the south nucleus. The yellow vertical line represents one second of arc, or 490 parsecs at the distance of NGC 6240. Image Credit: C. Max, G. Canalizo, and W. de Vries.

Astronomers have discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

Using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, Livermore scientists observed that the two black holes formed at the center of a rotating disk of stars in the galaxy merger known as NGC 6240 and are surrounded by a cloud of young star clusters.

Supermassive black holes contain millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and are believed to exist in the center 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. And the new research, which appears in the May 17 edition of Science Express, confirms the exact location and environment of the two black holes from observations at the W.M. Keck Observatory.

"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. Max is an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics and a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz. "The adaptive optics results enabled us to tie it all together, so now we can really see it all

[ricktendo]

WOW I'm gonna go there now

[cro-man]

Send me a postcard from there :stargate7xu5:

Edited May 18, 2007 by cro-man