An unusual galaxy harbors three supermassive black holes, new study reveals

Three black holes appear to be feeding inside a single galaxy seen 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, and the two nearest its centre are close enough to spiral together within roughly 700 million years — though the paper reporting them calls it evidence, not a confirmed triplet

In astronomy, a broad emission line in hydrogen with no matching broad line in the forbidden oxygen doublet is a specific fingerprint: gas moving fast enough to smear the line out, packed densely enough to switch the forbidden transitions off. That combination is read as the broad-line region of gas whipping around an accreting black hole. A galaxy called J0148-4214, observed with the James Webb Space Telescope, shows three of those fingerprints…

James Webb Finds Three Active Supermassive Black Holes In One Distant Galaxy

Astronomers have found something that sounds almost too crowded for a single galaxy: three actively feeding supermassive black holes in the distant galaxy J0148-4214. The discovery, made using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, provides the first evidence of three active black holes coexisting in a single galaxy in the distant universe. All three are accreting matter, while two sit remarkably close together near the galaxy’s center. The galaxy i…

An unusual galaxy harbors three supermassive black holes, new study reveals

The discovery reveals three active supermassive black holes in the galaxy J0148-4214 that accumulate matter through surrounding accretion disks. This system could help scientists understand how black holes and galaxies evolve together.Astronomers have discovered three active supermassive black holes in a single galaxy for the first time.Every massive galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, as is the case with the Milky Way, where Sag…