An international team of astronomers has discovered a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other , a fact that has been possible thanks to a particular strategy of work together with the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.
The strategy followed by the experts has been based on non-stop observation , even taking advantage of the periods in which the telescope moves to go from one point to another in the sky, this is to change orientation, a time in which the camera normally the telescope remains off. Thanks to this, scientists discovered an X-ray flash like when a black hole tears apart a star in its environment, which in turn led to the valuable discovery of a binary system of black holes located in the center of a galaxy located about 2 billion light years from Earth .
“There may be a whole population of dormant galaxies that host binary hole systems at their centers, but finding them is a difficult task because there are no gas clouds feeding them and therefore those centers are dark,” says Stefanie Komossa of the Max Institute. Planck from Radio Astronomy (Germany), participant in the discovery that has been published in the Astrophysical Journal .
The researchers’ first estimates determine that the main black hole would have a mass equivalent to 10 million that of the Sun ; the second, the smallest, would probably have a mass 1 million times the mass of the Sun.
According to astronomers, within about two million years the two black holes will merge into one then emit huge amounts of energy not only in the form of X – rays, but as a super – power source of gravitational waves.
