Astronomers pave the way in the search for supermassive black hole binaries in the hearts of galaxies

A team of astronomers including CITA postdoctoral fellow Aretaios Lalakos and CITA Professor Richard Bond,  has bolstered the evidence for the existence of one of the most remarkable, yet elusive, phenomena in the universe: pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in orbit around each other in the centres of galaxies.

Their research, recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, describes the discovery — as well as the “fingerprint” they used to identify the SMBH pairs and how it paves the way for finding more.

Read the rest of the story on A&S News.

A visualization depicting two supermassive black holes in orbit around each other.
Photo credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d’Ascoli et al. 2018.