2 supermassive black holes discovered

WASHINGTON, DC — Astronomers at The University of New Mexico (UNM) have discovered the existence of orbiting supermassive black holes.

A university news release said the discovery of the two black holes, located hundreds of millions of light years from our planet, was more than a decade in the making.

Karishma Bansal, a graduate student at the university’s physics and astronomy department, was the lead author on the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Indian American student and Prof. Greg Taylor, along with colleagues at Stanford, the US Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, have been studying the interaction between the two black holes for a dozen years.

In early 2016, an international team of researchers, including a UNM alumnus, detected the existence of gravitational waves, confirming Albert Einstein’s 100-year-old prediction, and astonishing the scientific community.

These gravitational waves were the result two stellar mass black holes colliding in space within the Hubble time.

Bansal said that the black holes have a combined mass of 15 billion times that of the sun. The unbelievable size of these black holes means their orbital period is around 24,000 years.

Bansal and Taylor said that the research could also teach us a lot about the universe, where galaxies come from and where they’re going.