American astronomers have discovered the largest and most massive pair of black holes ever. The objects orbit each other, but appear too heavy to collide and merge.
Black holes are located 750 million light-years from Earth. Together, they are 28 billion times heavier than our sun. Individually, they are not the largest black holes ever discovered, but together they are the largest pair of black holes ever discovered.
Black holes often orbit each other. At some point, they will collide and perhaps merge into an even larger supermassive black hole. But these black holes appear to maintain a constant distance from each other, the researchers from Stanford University wrote Astrophysical Journal.
The two black holes are all that remains of the “cascade collision” of galaxies. But over the past three million years, the distance between them has remained 24 light-years.
“Black holes usually have enough mass to swing across the universe. But these two have already swallowed up everything in the environment, and are therefore virtually stationary,” explains researcher Roger Romani.
Researchers continue to study black holes. In this way, they hope to find out whether supermassive black holes can actually merge, or whether they continue to orbit each other forever.
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