image source: NASA
A recent press release highlighted a study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to track two pairs of supermassive black holes on collision courses in dwarf galaxies. This discovery provides important information about the growth of black holes in the early Universe, as it is the first evidence for such an impending encounter.
Dwarf galaxies, which contain stars with a total mass less than 3 billion Suns, are thought to merge to grow into the larger galaxies seen today. However, observing the first generation of dwarf galaxy mergers is difficult due to their great distances and faintness. To overcome this challenge, the study implemented a systematic survey of deep Chandra X-ray observations and compared them with infrared data from NASA's Wide Infrared Survey Explorer and optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
The team identified two pairs of bright X-ray sources in colliding dwarf galaxies, providing evidence of two black holes. One pair is in the galaxy cluster Abell 133, located 760 million light-years from Earth, and is in the late stages of a merger, with a long tail caused by tidal effects from the collision. The other pair was discovered in Abell 1758S, a galaxy cluster about 3.2 billion light-years away, and is caught in the early stages of a merger, causing a bridge of stars and gas to connect the two colliding galaxies from their gravitational interaction.
The study's findings shed light on the processes that are crucial for understanding galaxies and their black holes in the earliest stages of the Universe, which could provide insight into our Milky Way's own past. A paper describing these results is being published in The Astrophysical Journal, and the authors of the study are from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations.
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