Astronomers have found three actively feeding supermassive black holes in a single galaxy from the early universe, the first time such a trio has been identified in a distant galaxy.
The galaxy, known as J0148-4214, sits more than 12.5 billion light years from Earth, according to the research team. Its light took about 12.5 billion years to reach us, so astronomers see it as it looked around 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The discovery came from observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, led by Hannah Übler at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Two of the black holes sit near the centre of the galaxy, separated by a projected distance of just 620 light years, New Scientist reported. A third sits about 5,500 light years from the centre, in the galaxy’s outer region.
The team put the three masses at about 80 million, 600,000 and 2 million times the mass of the Sun, New Scientist reported. The researchers expect the inner pair to merge over the coming few hundred million years.
The smaller central black hole is gathering material faster than its much larger neighbour, the researchers found. Its feeding rate passes the Eddington limit, the maximum predicted by basic growth models.
Übler said the finding was “the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant Universe”. The result gives astronomers a direct look at how massive black holes came together so soon after the universe began.
Source: New Scientist
