Saturday, March 7, 2009

Shall We Dance? Astronomers Spot Two Black Holes Performing Cosmic Minuet

An artist's conception of the two supermassive black holes that orbit each other every 100 years. The findings were published in the journal Nature

From The Daily Mail:

Two colossal black holes appear to be orbiting one another in sort of a cosmic minuet at the centre of a faraway galaxy formed when two separate galaxies collided, U.S. astronomers said.

These two so-called supermassive black holes, which are celestial objects with enormous gravitational pull, are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, or the distance light travels in a year.

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