Journey to the Closest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxy NGC 7727 | ESO

Journey to the Closest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxy NGC 7727 | ESO

This video takes us to NGC 7727, a galaxy located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius and home to the closest pair of supermassive black holes found to date. The pair is also the one with the smallest separation between two supermassive black holes—observed to be just 1,600 light-years apart in the sky.

Each of the two black holes is located at the center of one of the two bright nuclei in NGC 7727 visible in the final part of the video. The two black holes are on a collision course, doomed to crash together and merge into one giant black hole probably within the next 250 million years.

The close-up view of the central region of NGC 7727 and its two nuclei was taken with the MUSE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/L. Calçada ; N. Risinger; Digitized Sky Survey 2; VST ATLAS team; Voggel et al.

Duration: 50 seconds

Release Date: November 30, 2021

#NASA #ESO #Astronomy #Space #Science #BlackHoles #Galaxy #NGC7727 #Aquarius #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #Telescope #VLT #MUSE #ParanalObservatory #Chile #Europe #STEM #Education #HD #Video