Astronomers have discovered the pair of supermassive black holes at the heart of colliding galaxies that is closest to Earth.
Eventually, the collision process creates a new galaxy with a disordered and asymmetrical shape not resembling either of its predecessors.
The newly released image of NGC 7727, which is located about 89 million light-years from Earth, was captured using Focal Reducer and Low Dispersion Spectrograph 2 instrument, which is part of the Very Large Telescope located in northern Chile. The two galactic nuclei at the heart of the galaxy NGC 7727 contain supermassive black holes that will eventually merge.
While this isn't the first image of this galactic merger, it shows NGC 7727 in intricate and unprecedented detail, including the faint trails of stripped galactic material that wrap around the galaxy's main body. These long arms of dust, gas and stars that ripped from each progenitor galaxy long ago surround the galaxy their merger has created, almost creating the illusion of a galactic embrace.
The two bright points visible at the center of NGC 7727 are further evidence of the galaxies' prior violent cosmic tussle. These are the merging galaxies' cores, each occupied by its own supermassive black hole, some of the last parts of the galaxy to coalesce. and will merge in around 250 million years, a tiny amount of time in cosmic terms. The collision will leave behind a black hole even larger than either predecessor is today.
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