An international team of astronomers led by Hannah Übler of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has discovered three actively accreting supermassive black holes in a single galaxy.
The galaxy J0148-4214 is more than 12,5 billion light-years from Earth. Its light traveled to us for about 12,5 billion years, so we see the object as it was roughly 1,2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The researchers measured a redshift of z = 5,02 and used data from the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in such a distant Universe.
Two black holes are located close to the center of the galaxy and are separated by a projected distance of only 620 light-years. The third is in the outer region, approximately 5500 light-years from the center.
The masses of the objects are estimated at approximately 80 million, 600 thousand and 2 million solar masses. The galaxy has a total stellar mass of about 1,3 billion solar masses, and the black holes account for a significant fraction of it.
One of the less massive holes is accreting matter especially intensively and may be exceeding the Eddington limit. The two central ones are estimated to be able to merge within several hundred million years.
The discovery provides new data on how massive black holes grew and interacted in the early Universe. How exactly did such complex systems form so quickly after the Big Bang?
The results are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. They highlight the role of mergers in the growth of black holes in the young eras of the cosmos.
