Found a pair of black holes doomed to collide
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Two supermassive black holes have been seen consuming cosmic material. Astronomers watch as two galaxies merge in deep space.
Astronomers spotted the process through the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array of Telescopes, or ALMA, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert to observe two merging galaxies about 500 million light-years from Earth.
The two black holes grew in tandem near the center of the merging galaxy resulting from the merger. They met when their host galaxies, known as UGC 4211, collided.
The mass of one of them is 200 million times the mass of our Sun, and the other is 125 million times.
Although the black holes themselves are not directly visible, they were both surrounded by bright clusters of stars and warm glowing gas, all of which are attracted by the holes’ gravitational pull.
Over time, they will begin to circle each other in an orbit, eventually crashing into each other and forming a single black hole.
The results of the study were presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle and published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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