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Cairo – Samia Sayed – At the heart of almost every galaxy is a supermassive black hole, which gets its own classification: supermassive black holes, millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun, and when two galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes get closer and closer until they merge These monsters at the end too.
This nearly incomprehensible process appears in an image recently shared by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which shows a nearly compact galaxy containing the closest pair of supermassive black holes ever discovered, just 1,600 light-years away. 7727 as two galaxies, they began merging about a billion years ago, and within the next hundreds of millions of years, the two supermassive black holes are set to collide creating an even larger black hole in the process.
The image was taken using the Very Large Telescope, a ground-based telescope located in the Atacama Desert in Chile and consisting of four individual telescopes, each with an 8.2-meter-wide primary mirror, according to Digitartlends.
On one of these telescopes, called the VLT UT1, is an instrument called the FOcal Reducer and Spectrograph 2 or FORS2, which is able to take spectrometry data from multiple targets simultaneously as well as measure the polarization of light.
FORS2 captured the galaxy in which the two black holes are approaching each other in this image, showing how regions of stars, dust and gas around the edges of the galaxy extend into space, creating tails extending from the main body of the galaxy.
This image also provides a preview of what might eventually happen to our Milky Way, when it merges with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in billions of years.
As ESO writes, “Our galaxy, which also has a supermassive black hole at its center, is on its way to merging with our nearest and largest neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy, billions of years from now. This photo gives us a glimpse into the future.”
compact galaxy