The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on February 22 that it has discovered two massive black holes in a dwarf galaxy that are on a collision course, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
NASA emphasized that this collision could provide scientists with crucial information about the evolution of black holes in the early universe.
Two massive black holes in a dwarf galaxy on a collision course. (Source: NASA)
By definition, dwarf galaxies contain stars with a total mass less than approximately 3 billion times that of the Sun.
Astronomers have long hypothesized that dwarf galaxies merge relatively early, especially in the early universe, to develop into the larger galaxies we observe today.
However, current technology has been unable to observe early dwarf galaxy mergers due to the faintness of images from such vast distances.
The new study adopted a different approach by conducting a systematic survey of deep observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and comparing them with data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer and optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
American astronomers searched for pairs of bright X-ray sources in colliding dwarf galaxies as evidence of the two black holes, discovering two examples: one located in the Abell 133 galaxy cluster, approximately 760 million light-years from Earth, and the other in the Abell 1758S galaxy cluster, about 3.2 billion light-years away.
According to NASA, both pairs exhibit structures characteristic of galaxy collisions, which are expected to help expand our understanding of black hole development.
