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Triple Black Hole Collision & A New Stellar Class | Aug 14
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST has confirmed the first-ever triple active black hole system in the early universe — and a separate MIT team may have discovered an entirely new class of object called a black hole star. Both findings challenge how we think supermassive black holes grew so fast after the Big Bang.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Three black holes are on a collision course in a galaxy from the early universe, and JWST just caught all three of them feeding at once. That's the lead today, and the implications reach well beyond one galaxy.
Here's what matters about that last point. Prior to this, single-digit detections of multiple AGN systems had astronomers treating them as outliers.
Separately, an MIT-led team announced a different kind of object entirely. MoM-BH-1 is a black hole of roughly one hundred thousand solar masses wrapped inside a hydrogen envelope the size of a solar system.
Both discoveries push on the same underlying tension. Billion solar mass black holes exist at redshifts above seven, meaning they were already enormous within the first eight hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The central black hole pair in J0148-4214 will merge in approximately six hundred sixty million years. Current modelling puts the probability of the future space-based gravitational wave detector LISA detecting that event at eighty-two percent.
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