Paired galactic black holes

Supermassive Black Holes Collide in Galactic Merger Grand Finales

All in all, the scientists analyzed 96 galaxies observed with the Keck Observatory and 385 galaxies from the Hubble archive. All of those galaxies are located an average of 330 million light-years from Earth, relatively close by in cosmic terms, with many similar in size to the Milky Way.

The researchers found that more than 17 percent of these galaxies hosted a pair of black holes at their centers, signs of the late stages of a galactic merger. These findings matched the researchers’ computer simulations, which suggested that highly active but heavily obscured black holes hidden within gas- and dust-rich galaxies are responsible for many mergers of supermassive black holes.