Astronomers found out the closest pair of supermassive black holes to Earth by the help of European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. These new found objects have a little separation gap and it is supposed that these objects will eventually merge into one giant black hole.
Scientists are also determined about the fact that how gravitational pull of the black holes are influencing the motion of the stars around the two objects. The scientists said, the bigger black hole is situated at the heart of NGC 7727. NGC 7727 is almost 154 million times that of the Sun and is surrounded by 6.3 million solar masses.
This is the first time; the scientists could measure the masses of a supermassive black hole pair. Scientists could do this because of the close proximity of the system to Earth. The team of scientists got to observe the two objects from Paranal Observatory in Chile and they have used Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer. They have also added data collected by Hubble Space Telescope of NASA. They combined these two data and confirmed that the objects in NGC 7727 were indeed supermassive black holes.
Previously, the astronomers suspected that the galaxy hosted the two black holes. But they were unsure about this fact. They also think that there are many of these relics of galaxy mergers and have many hidden massive black holes, that are waiting there to be discovered. Scientists think their discoveries will increase the total number of supermassive black holes in Earth’s local universe by 30 percent.
