Researchers observed two powerful black holes in a distant galaxy circling each other "like dance partners."
The team observed the phenomenon using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release reported.
"We think the jet of one black hole is being wiggled by the other, like a dance with ribbons," lead author Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. "If so, it is likely the two black holes are fairly close and gravitationally entwined."
Researchers believe the two black holes may be merging with each other.
"At first we thought this galaxy's unusual properties seen by WISE might mean it was forming new stars at a furious rate," Peter Eisenhardt, WISE project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a co-author of the study, said. "But on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes."
Almost every galaxy is believed to contain a supermassive black hole much larger than the Sun. Researchers are working to uncover how these objects grow so large in the first place. The black holes could grow by eating materials in the universe, or through a method referred to as "galactic cannibalism."
When two galaxies collide their black holes become locked into this gravitational "dance" in the center of the new structure. Eventually the two could merge and create an even larger black hole.
These black hole pairs, dubbed black hole binaries, get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.
The team identified the black hole binaries by looking at the jet that normally shoots from the center of a black hole. This jet tends to be "pencil-straight," but in this case it was zig-zagged. The scientists believe a second black hole could be interfering with the jet.
"We note some caution in interpreting this mysterious system," Daniel Stern of JPL, a co-author of the study, said. "There are several extremely unusual properties to this system, from the multiple radio jets to the Gemini data, which indicate a highly perturbed disk of accreting material around the black hole, or holes. Two merging black holes, which should be a common event in the universe, would appear to be simplest explanation to explain all the current observations."
