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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
general
A close-pair binary in a distant triple supermassive black hole system
Nature, Volume 511, No. 7507, Year 2014
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Description
Galaxies are believed to evolve through merging, which should lead to some hosting multiple supermassive black holes. There are four known triple black hole systems, with the closest black hole pair being 2.4 kiloparsecs apart (the third component in this system is at 3 kiloparsecs), which is far from the gravitational sphere of influence (about 100 parsecs for a black hole with mass one billion times that of the Sun). Previous searches for compact black hole systems concluded that they were rare, with the tightest binary system having a separation of 7 parsecs (ref. 10). Here we report observations of a triple black hole system at redshift z = 0.39, with the closest pair separated by about 140 parsecs and significantly more distant from Earth than any other known binary of comparable orbital separation. The effect of the tight pair is to introduce a rotationally symmetric helical modulation on the structure of the large-scale radio jets, which provides a useful way to search for other tight pairs without needing extremely high resolution observations. As we found this tight pair after searching only six galaxies, we conclude that tight pairs are more common than hitherto believed, which is an important observational constraint for low-frequency gravitational wave experiments. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
Authors & Co-Authors
Deane, Roger P.
South Africa, Cape Town
University of Cape Town
South Africa, Pinelands
Square Kilometre Array, South Africa
Paragi, Zsolt
Netherlands, Dwingeloo
Joint Institute for Vlbi in Europe
Jarvis, Matthew J.
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
South Africa, Bellville
University of the Western Cape
Coriat, Mickaël
South Africa, Cape Town
University of Cape Town
South Africa, Pinelands
Square Kilometre Array, South Africa
Bernardi, Gianni
South Africa, Pinelands
Square Kilometre Array, South Africa
South Africa, Grahamstown
Rhodes University
United States, Cambridge
Harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Fender, Robert P.
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Frey, Sandor
Hungary, Budapest
Budapest Főváros Kormányhivatala, Földmérési, Távérzékelési és Földhivatali Főosztály Bfkh Ftff
Heywood, Ian
South Africa, Grahamstown
Rhodes University
Australia, Sydney
Australia Telescope National Facility
Klöckner, Hans Rainer
Germany, Bonn
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
Grainge, Keith J.B.
United Kingdom, Manchester
The University of Manchester
Rumsey, Clare
United Kingdom, Cambridge
Department of Physics
Statistics
Citations: 90
Authors: 11
Affiliations: 12
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1038/nature13454
ISSN:
00280836
e-ISSN:
14764687