A trio of heavyweight black holes are entangled in a dance of death that will quite possibly see them gradually all merge to form an even greater behemoth.
Scientists have discovered the black holes in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken 12.5 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. And it's offering strong supporting evidence that one of the ways black holes grew so massive so quickly in the early universe was through mergers.
"This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant universe," Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany who led the study, said in a statement. "It suggests that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together, setting the stage for the massive black-hole mergers we expect to detect with future Read Entire Article
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