What's Weirder that a Single Super Massive Black Hole? Dual Supermassive Black holes!

The Chandra X-ray telescope continues to find some of the strangest objects in the Universe. Case in point - A pair of super massive black holes in the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393.

In the image here, we see a composite of blue which is the X-ray information from Chandra and gold which is the optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope. And according to the Wired article, the insert is just data of the high energy x-rays as seen by Chandra. The blue indicates hot gas but low x-ray energy, it also indicates strong iron bands which means the pair are growing.

Since black holes of this size are found mostly in the center of galaxies, the pair indicates a collision between two separate galaxies which also accounts for the large amount of gas and dust that are obscuring the pair.

What is truly amazing is that it is obvious that the pair of super-massive black holes are strongly influencing each other. Astronomically speaking they are close, but the influence is being felt over a distance of 490 light years! Plus at 160 million light years, they are the closest pair of super-massive black holes us.

Milky Way Sized Black Hole Seems To be Waking

Everything is relative.... How many times have you heard that, huh? We look at our sun, solar system and Milky Way and find that for the most part they are all about the same in a relative kind of way. Then we find that some of these galaxies have monstrous black holes at their centers. But far from being a deal breaker, the Milky Way has one of these animals at its center as well. A huge 4 thousand Sols in fact and scientist now are saying that eventually ALL galaxies will have these monsters at their centers as well. So, again things are the same relatively speaking.

And now along comes another deal breaker. In 2010 a team of astronomers spotted what appeared to be a flare from a previously inactive black hole in a galaxy about two billion light-years away. What caught my eye in this article was not that the black hole seemed to be waking up or even that another galaxy HAD a super massive black hole - as super massive black hole with an event horizon the size of the milky Way! (I say event horizon because in reality a black hole is infinitely long and infinitely narrow at the opening. However its influence spreads far from the opening, with huge warpings of space time. The event horizon is that point of influence where light itself can no longer escape from being drawn into the central opening. )

complete article here