Gemini North helps confirm nature of cosmic system on the verge of becoming a giant elliptical galaxy. Astronomers using an array of ground- and space-based telescopes, including Gemini North on Hawai‘i, have uncovered a closely bound duo of energetic quasars — the hallmark of a pair of merging g
that are many billions of times the mass of our Sun. Although astronomers have observed a veritable menagerie of merging galaxies with more than one quasar in our own cosmic neighborhood, more distant examples, seen when the Universe was only a quarter of its current age, are quite rare and extremely challenging to find.
By harnessing a bevy of ground- and space-based observatories — including Gemini North, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s— a team of astronomers has discovered a closely bound pair of actively feeding supermassive black holes — quasars.
Searching for pairs of supermassive black holes so close to each other during this early epoch is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. The challenge is that most black-hole pairs are too close to distinguish individually. To definitively detect such a system, the two supermassive black holes need to be actively accreting and shining as quasars simultaneously, conditions that are extremely rare.
Astronomers know, however, that the distant Universe should be brimming with pairs of supermassive black holes embedded within merging galaxies. The first hints of such a system were found in data from theTo verify the true nature of this system, the team searched through observatory’s vast database and found that this system had an apparent “jiggle,” which could be the result of sporadic changes in aThe team then used the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph and GNIRS on Gemini North, which provided the team with independent measurements of the distance to the quasars and confirmed that the two objects were both quasars rather than a chance alignment of a single quasar with a foreground star. Further studies with the W.M.
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