Two Huge Black Holes on a Collision Course!
Posted on March 11, 2009 by admin Under Others · Leave a Comment
Black holes, which were once just a figment of our imagination, have now become real, but astronomers are becoming better at figuring out the stuff that are hard to find because they take in the light which passes through the event horizon. Black holes can be categorized into 2: fairly small ones formed due to collapse of big stars, and the humongous ones which seem to be under the heart of most of the galaxies. When given enough fuel, they will power quasars, but when they don’t have enough input, they become inactive, like the ones present in the middle of the Milky Way.
The presence of these black holes in the middle of these galaxies has been made more interesting because astronomers have come to the conclusion that a lot of galaxies have been formed by the joining together of tinier ones. This could mean that once everything settles down, the galaxy should have 2 black holes, with some gravitational attraction, which can induce a collision. An issue of Nature describes something which seems to be the best evidence for an extremely huge black hole binary, one where the 2 objects seem to be heading for an unavoidable collision course.
It wasn’t easy getting this. The authors made use of data obtained by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has more than 900,000 galaxies. The authors looked at a small set of data which has more than 17,000 quasars and filtered them by a main components analysis which will be able to identify outliers with some different properties of spectral. From the huge database, a total of 2 objects were found to have emitted light with more than a redshift.
There are 2 possible ways to obtain one quasar using more than a redshift. The first way is to get 2 quasars which are separated from each other but there on the very same line of sight with relation to the earth. On the basis of the frequency of the quasars present in the area from which the data is obtained, the authors find that this should take place on a frequency of something around 1.8 x 10-7; as they have observed more than 17,000 cases, it comes down to one last probability of 3.2 x 10-3. This is fairly small, but not impossible.
The authors do go on and give a description of a variety of spectral features that lean more towards the other possibility for the double red shift: 2 objects within close range of each other that are moving fairly quickly relative to one another. This is very much the type of behavior you could expect if 2 extremely big black holes were revolving each other within a close proximity of each other.
Basically, when a matter gets closer to a black hole, it will go faster and produce more broad spectral lines due to this. The matter, which will be even out, will result in a sharper and narrower spectral line. This new system seems to be having 2 broad spectrum sources which are combined in one narrow band emission source.
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