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A close-pair binary in a distant triple supermassive black hole system
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A close-pair binary in a distant triple supermassive black hole system
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Journal Article
A close-pair binary in a distant triple supermassive black hole system
2014
Overview
A triple supermassive black hole system has been found that shows helical modulation of the large-scale radio jets; this modulation is caused by two of the black holes being tightly coupled as a binary system.
Black holes get close in triplets
The discovery of a triple supermassive black hole system in a distant (redshift
z
= 0.39) galaxy provides a rare opportunity to observe what may be the result of galactic mergers. In the four known triple black hole systems, the smallest distance between a pair of black holes is 2.4 kiloparsecs, but the newly discovered triple system includes a 'tight pair' separated by around 140 parsecs. The authors show that the presence of the tight pair is imprinted onto the properties of the large-scale radio jets generated by the black holes, providing a useful way of searching for other tight pairs without the need for extremely high-resolution observations. Six candidate galaxies were surveyed in this study, a 'hit rate' that suggests that tight pairs are more common than was thought. Close-pair binaries are useful targets for gravitational wave studies, so the development of an efficient way of finding them, and the prospect of there being more of them, should stimulate interest in work on predicting the strength of gravitational waves and assist in their eventual detection.
Galaxies are believed to evolve through merging
1
, which should lead to some hosting multiple supermassive black holes
2
,
3
,
4
. There are four known triple black hole systems
5
,
6
,
7
,
8
, with the closest black hole pair being 2.4 kiloparsecs apart (the third component in this system is at 3 kiloparsecs)
7
, which is far from the gravitational sphere of influence (about 100 parsecs for a black hole with mass one billion times that of the Sun). Previous searches for compact black hole systems concluded that they were rare
9
, with the tightest binary system having a separation of 7 parsecs (ref.
10
). Here we report observations of a triple black hole system at redshift
z
= 0.39, with the closest pair separated by about 140 parsecs and significantly more distant from Earth than any other known binary of comparable orbital separation. The effect of the tight pair is to introduce a rotationally symmetric helical modulation on the structure of the large-scale radio jets, which provides a useful way to search for other tight pairs without needing extremely high resolution observations. As we found this tight pair after searching only six galaxies, we conclude that tight pairs are more common than hitherto believed, which is an important observational constraint for low-frequency gravitational wave experiments
11
,
12
.
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
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