NEW DELHI: Indian researchers have discovered three supermassive black holes from three galaxies merging together to form a triple active galactic nucleus (AGN), that has a much-higher-than-normal luminosity.
The rare occurrence in the nearby universe indicates that small merging groups are ideal laboratories to detect multiple accreting supermassive black holes and increases the possibility of detecting such occurrences.
Supermassive black holes are difficult to detect because they do not emit any light, but can reveal their presence by interacting with their surroundings.
When the dust and gas from the surroundings fall onto a supermassive black hole, some of the mass is swallowed by the black hole, but some of it is converted into energy and emitted as electromagnetic radiation that makes the black hole appear very luminous.
A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics consisting of Jyoti Yadav, Mousumi Das, and Sudhanshu Barway along with Francoise Combes of College de France, Chaire Galaxies et Cosmologie, Paris, while studying a known interacting galaxy pair, NGC7733, and NGC7734, detected unusual emissions from the centre of NGC7734 and a large, bright clump along the northern arm of NGC7733.
"Their investigations showed that the clump is moving with a different velocity compared to the galaxy NGC7733 itself. The scientists meant that this clump was not a part of NGC7733; rather, it was a small separate galaxy behind the arm. They named this galaxy NGC7733N," a release from the Ministry of Science and Technology said on Friday. (IANS)
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