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Cosmic chaos: In a galaxy far, far away, two humongous black holes are going head-to-head in a gravitational grappling match. NASA's iconic Hubble telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory just caught a glimpse of the duo, which scientists estimate will keep circling ever closer until inevitably colliding.
At just 300 light-years apart, these are the nearest confirmed pair of supermassive black holes spotted in our local universe using visible and X-ray light observations. While more distant black hole couples have been found before, this one provides an unprecedented close-up look at a showdown that was likely much more common back in the early universe, when galaxies merged a lot more frequently.
The scientists first realized something was up when they noticed diffraction spikes in the Hubble images, pointing towards a huge concentration of glowing hot gas crammed into a significantly small region – well, small in galactic terms.
"This view is not a common occurrence in the nearby universe, and told us there's something else going on inside the galaxy," said Anna Trindade Falcão, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the discovery.
Such spikes are created when bright light sources bend around the mirrors inside telescopes. Hubble had spotted three of them nestled inside the core of the galaxy.
When Falcão's team turned Chandra's X-ray vision toward the same galaxy, two brilliant high-energy sources were shining right where those optical spikes appeared. All the signs pointed to a pair of ravenously feeding supermassive black holes, converting masses of infalling gas and dust into searing radiation as active galactic nuclei (AGN).
The third glowing spot is more mysterious. It could be a shockwave of gas blasted by high-speed plasma jets firing from one of the black holes like a powerful stream of water hitting a sandpile.
This whole occurrence stems from the merger of two galaxies eons ago. Each galaxy originally hosted a single supermassive black hole at its core. As the galaxies drifted together and slowly collided, so did their central black holes.
The two giants are now just 300 light-years apart, furiously devouring any surrounding material to put on a dazzling light show. But they're still slowly circling inward under their mutual pull of gravity. In perhaps 100 million years, they'll eventually unite in a collision – "rattling the fabric of space and time as gravitational waves," as NASA put it.
"We wouldn't be able to see all of these intricacies without Hubble's amazing resolution," said Falcão.
Image credit: Joseph Olmsted/NASA