Giant black holes in a collision trajectory: NASA images

Huge black holes on a collision path: NASA images leave you speechless. This is what was discovered thanks to the observations of the NASA Chandra X-ray telescope, which focused on the study of a pair of supermassive black holes that are found in "dwarf" galaxies on a collision course. Scientists had never seen such an event before.

Credit: NASA

By definition, dwarf galaxies contain stars with a total mass of less than 3 billion suns, around 20 times less massive than the Milky Way. Astronomers have long suspected that these galaxies merge, particularly at the dawn of the universe. However, with the technology we have, we are not able to observe the oldest fusion galaxies.

A new study, however, seems to have succeeded by combining the data of the NASA Chandra telescope with the infrared ones of the Wide Infrared Survey Explorer and the optical ones of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Well, the team searched pairs of X-ray light sources in the colliding dwarf galaxies, discovering two excellent examples of supermassive black holes on a collision course.

The details of the merging of black holes and dwarf galaxies can give us a useful glimpse into the past of our Milky Way. Scientists believe that almost all galaxies were originally dwarves and have grown for billions of years by collisions and merging with other galaxies.

References: NASA