A team of scientists led by Hannah Uebler from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, discovered three supermassive black holes at once, which turned out to be the most distant trio from Earth in the history of observations. As spectroscopic analysis showed, two of them came together in a kind of dance due to the approaching merger, writes The New York Times (NYT).
A complete merger of these two holes has not yet occurred, but the authors of a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics predict it will happen within the next 700 million years. A third supermassive black hole in this galaxy could also eventually collapse toward its center, triggering another merger, astronomers say.
In a commentary to the NYT, Uebler added that all known galaxies have black holes at their centers, and some have more than one, but this trio turned out to be unique. They were detected at a distance of over 12.5 billion light years in the J0148-4214 galaxy thanks to the advanced capabilities of the James Webb.
The galaxy is about a billion years old, making it and similar galaxies fertile ground for studying the evolution of the Milky Way. Scientists hope, by observing such “dances,” to understand how black holes become supermassive—millions or billions of times heavier than the Sun.
“The likely discovery of black hole trios at high redshift, coupled with other recent results in the study of black hole pairs, suggests that systems with multiple massive black holes may have been common in the early Universe,” the astronomers emphasized in the paper.
