Congratulations: Our own junior physics major Jenna Harvey co-authored a paper describing the fantastic discovery of a system of three supermassive black holes on a close collision course!This work, which just appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, was led by graduate student Ryan Pfeifle, under the advising of Prof. Shobita Satyapal of George Mason University, and involves a team of scientists who put together observations and measurements from quite a variety of telescopes, both ground and space based.
The massive crash of three galaxies at the center of which this triple accreting supermassive black hole system has been discovered was found thanks to new techniques that exploited the power of infrared light to peer through cosmic dust that usually enshrouds, and thus hides, newly activated black holes that just started sucking matter onto them.
The paper that describes this discovery, which Jenna co-authored, provides one of the strongest observational evidence to date for such a triple interacting galaxy system, which has eluded us until now.
Jenna's contribution to this work, under the advice of professor Anca Constantin, entailed analysis of observations from the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBT). Jenna worked on the LBT data the collaboration has for a sample of fifteen interacting galaxy pairs, and found that in one of these systems, that showed an unusual ensemble of three X-ray nuclear sources, gas is swirling at speeds of thousands of km/s (which is just a fraction of the speed of light), proving that it is through galaxy collisions events like this one that black holes begin to actively snack and therefore grow, maybe before they merge onto a larger one.
An overview of Jenna's work on the whole sample of interacting galaxies that hosted this unusual discovery can be seen in the poster that she presented at the end of summer 2019 at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.
This discovery has gotten a lot of press already, check them all out: NASA press release, CNN, Space.com, The Register (UK), VICE, a German newspaper, the LBT site, and you might even have heard about it already from Fox and MSN.
Way to go Jenna!
