LOS ANGELES-Astronomers have spotted three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies, according to a release of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Thursday.
The unusual system was captured by several observatories, including three NASA space telescopes.
“We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” said Ryan Pfeifle of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, the first author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal describing these results.
“This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes,” he said.
To uncover this rare black hole trifecta, researchers needed to combine data from telescopes both on the ground and in space.
Then, data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, managed by JPL, revealed that the system was glowing intensely in infrared light during a phase in the galaxy merger when more than one of the black holes is expected to be feeding rapidly.