LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) — NASA announced Wednesday that a new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a pair of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies on collision courses.
This is the first evidence of such an imminent collision, providing scientists with important information about the growth of black holes in the early universe, according to NASA.
And ((NASA)) indicated that dwarf galaxies, by definition, contain stars whose total mass is less than about three billion times the mass of the sun.
Astronomers have long suspected that dwarf galaxies merge, especially in the relatively early universe, to grow into the larger galaxies seen today. However, current technology cannot observe the first generation of dwarf galaxy mergers because they are unusually faint at their great distances, according to NASA.
The new study overcame these challenges by systematically scanning Chandra’s deep X-ray observations and comparing them with infrared data from NASA’s Wide Infrared Survey Explorer and optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
US astronomers have looked for pairs of bright X-ray sources in colliding dwarf galaxies as evidence of two black holes, and have discovered two examples.
One pair resides in the Abell 133 galaxy cluster, 760 million light-years from Earth. The other is in the Abell 1758S galaxy group, about 3.2 billion light-years away. Both pairs show structures that are hallmarks of galaxy collisions, according to NASA.