Two Black Holes Discovered Circling Each Other

One of NASA's most powerful telescopes has found what appears to be two supermassive black holes orbiting one another at the very center of a distant galaxy, an incredibly rare sight that has scientists very excited at what could be learned from the discovery.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, to find the two black holes in a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away from Earth. The objects, technically called WISE J233237.05-505643.5, are black hole binaries. Black hole binaries form when galaxies merge and black holes get locked in orbit with each other. As the two objects grow bigger by absorbing new material, the two objects grow closer and closer until one cannibalizes the other and forms a massive black hole. This new discovery shows the two black holes a few light-years away from each other, and is one of the few confirmed black hole binaries that scientists have discovered, and could teach them how supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies are formed.

Chao-Wei Tsai explained what the celestial phenomenon looks like and what may be happening across the universe at the sight of the two black holes.

"We think the jet of one black hole is being wiggled by the other, like a dance with ribbons...If so, it is likely the two black holes are fairly close and gravitationally entwined," Tsai told Astronomy.com. 

This type of black hole system is tough to identify, and Peter Eisenhardt of the Jet Propulsion Lab explains how tough it was to identify the objects using WISE.

"At first, we thought this galaxy's unusual properties seen by WISE might mean it was forming new stars at a furious rate...But on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes," said Eisenhardt. 

NASA was able to confirm the existence of the objects using radio images from the Australian Telescope Compact Array and visible-light spectral data from the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Another scientist working on the project, Daniel Stern, remains optimistic that these objects are indeed black hole binaries:

"We note some caution in interpreting this mysterious system...There are several extremely unusual properties to this system, from the multiple radio jets to the Gemini data, which indicate a highly perturbed disk of accreting material around the black hole, or holes. Two merging black holes, which should be a common event in the universe, would appear to be simplest explanation to explain all the current observations."