Two Indian scientists part of team to discover closest-ever super massive binary black hole

Two Indian scientists are part of the team that have discovered two closest-ever black holes, in a supermassive binary black hole system, located around 400 million light years away from our planet earth.

The latest discovery has been made by Preeti Kharb and Dharam Veer Lal of TIFR-National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune. The team included David Merrit from Rochester Institute of Technology, US.

The discovery made by the scientists was published online on Spetember 18 in Nature Astronomy.

According the scientists, the discovery has been termed unique as dual- black hole system is being housed in a spiral galaxy. The galaxy has been identified as NGC 7674 (Mrk 533).

According to scientists such system were known to be present but earlier believed to be present only in elliptical galaxies.

The newly discovered black holes discovered have been detected to be physically separated by just a light year and are part of an active galaxy.

According the galaxies, the active galaxies glow unusually intense at the centre, while normal galaxies appear evenly bright.

Lal said, “Elliptical galaxies are formed when two spiral galaxies collide and merge.”

He added that they possess one supermassive black hole located in its centre. But, in the recently discovered galaxy, there are binary supermassive black hole.