This is the first time scientists have found evidence of a young galaxy hosting three active supermassive black holes, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Two of them are so close to each other that it looks like they are about to merge.
Almost all massive galaxies studied by astronomers contain black holes at their centers, said lead author Hanna Opler of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Some pairs and triplets have been spotted in nearby galaxies, but no triplets have yet been spotted from Earth. They are more than 12.5 billion light-years apart, indicating that they are within about a billion years of the big bang.
A snapshot of the two black holes before they merge provides evidence that black holes have been growing, consuming stars and gas, and forming galaxies since the beginning of the universe.
“The assumption has always been that these black holes started growing at the beginning of the universe,” Opler said. Now we see them in reality.
Such a discovery was not possible until about four years ago, when the powerful James Webb Space Telescope began capturing images of cosmic light that had been traveling from the outer reaches of the universe for more than 13 billion years.
Its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, did not have Webb’s sensitivity or ability to analyze optical signals, said Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the research. At Hubble’s resolution, this galaxy would be just a few pixels in the image, too small to make out the three black holes within it.
