New Evidence That Merging Supermassive Black Holes Create Even More Powerful Forces In The Process

MessageToEagle.com – There is now evidence for a large number of double supermassive black holes, most probably precursors of gigantic black hole merging events.

In their new research astronomers confirm the current understanding of cosmological evolution – that galaxies and their associated black holes merge over time, forming bigger and bigger galaxies and black holes.

Astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire, together with an international team of scientists, have looked at radio maps of powerful jet sources and found signs that would usually be present when looking at black holes that are closely orbiting each other.

They studied the direction that these jets are emitted in, and variances in these directions; they compared the direction of the jets with the one of the radio lobes (that store all the particles that ever went through the jet channels) to demonstrate that this method can be used to indicate the presence of supermassive binary black holes.

Before black holes merge they form a binary black hole, where the two black holes orbit around each other.

“We have studied the jets in different conditions for a long time with computer simulations. In this first systematic comparison to high-resolution radio maps of the most powerful radio sources, we were astonished to find signatures that were compatible with jet precession in three quarters of the sources,” Dr Martin Krause, lead author and senior lecturer in Astronomy at the University of Hertfordshire, said in a press release.

The fact that the most powerful jets are associated with binary black holes could have important consequences for the formation of stars in galaxies; stars form from cold gas, jets heat this gas and thus suppress the formation of stars. A jet that always heads in the same direction only heats a limited amount of gas in its vicinity.

However, jets from binary black holes change direction continuously. Therefore, they can heat much more gas, suppressing the formation of stars much more efficiently, and thus contributing towards keeping the number of stars in galaxies within the observed limits.

Research

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