Astronomers Found Three Supermassive Black Holes Slamming Into Each Other

Three galaxies and their supermassive black holes are slowly crashing into one another about 1.2 billion light-years from Earth.

The system, known by the super catchy name of J1218/1219+1035 is a triple merger where all three galaxies are home to actively feeding supermassive black holes. Every galaxy in this three-galaxy pileup has its core engine turned up full blast. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Galaxy mergers are pretty common across the universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy shows signs of having merged a few times in the past. What’s unusual about this particular merger is that it happened in a slow, staggered sequence. It usually happens all at the same time. Add to that the fact that all three have black holes that are in their prime, which is even rarer.

So rare that J1218/1219+1035 is only the third triple-AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) system ever identified in the nearby universe, and the first where all three black holes are firing off jets as they devour surrounding material.

The system first popped out from the data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. At first, it looked like a typical two-galaxy merger, with the overlapping galaxies separated by about 74,000 light-years.

Then came the surprise: a third galaxy, 316,000 light-years away, also hosting an active AGN. A stream of gas connecting it to the other two confirmed that these three were on a collision course.

Systems like this are perfect for studying how galaxies and supermassive black holes evolve together. By observing all three black holes actively feeding at the same time, astronomers get a rare snapshot of growth happening in real time, on a colossal scale.

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