A study employing NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has monitored two pairs of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies that are traveling toward one another.
This is the first evidence of two giant black holes on a collision course, offering crucial knowledge to scientists about the development of black holes in the early universe.
Dwarf Galaxy Mergers
Dwarf galaxies are composed of stars with a total mass of fewer than 3 billion Suns or around 20 times that of the Milky Way. Scientists have long hypothesized that dwarf galaxies merged in the early cosmos to form bigger galaxies.
But due to their extreme faintness at such enormous distances, the initial generation of dwarf galaxy mergers cannot be observed with current technology.
These difficulties were overcome in the new work by employing a systematic assessment of deep Chandra X-ray observations and comparing them with optical and infrared data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and NASA's Wide Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), respectively.
The researchers searched for pairs of powerful X-ray sources in dwarf galaxies that were undergoing collisions, and they discovered two sources.
The composite image on the left shows one pair in the galaxy cluster Abell 133, which is 760 million light-years away from Earth. Pink represents Chandra X-ray data while blue represents CFHT optical data.
This pair of dwarf galaxies exhibit a long tail from tidal effects from the collision and seems to be in the last stages of merging.
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Mirabilis
The name "Mirabilis" was given to the new study by its authors in honor of a critically endangered hummingbird species distinguished by its unusually long tails. Abell 1758S, a galaxy cluster located about 3.2 billion light-years away, is where the other pair was found.
The merging dwarf galaxies were given the names "Elstir" and "Vinteuil" in honor of fictional artists from Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." The galaxy at the top is called Vinteuil, and the galaxy at the bottom is called Elstir.
The details of merging black holes and dwarf galaxies could reveal information about the past of our Milky Way galaxy. Nearly all galaxies are thought to have started as dwarf or other sorts of tiny galaxies and developed over billions of years through mergers, according to NASA.
Follow-up studies of these two systems will help astronomers investigate the mechanisms required for understanding galaxies and their black holes in the early universe.
The findings of the study were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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