A candidate sub-parsec supermassive binary black hole system

Todd A. Boroson () and Tod R. Lauer
Additional contact information
Todd A. Boroson: National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona 85726, USA
Tod R. Lauer: National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona 85726, USA

Nature, 2009, vol. 458, issue 7234, 53-55

Abstract: Black hole pair revealed Binary supermassive black hole systems should be quite common, as the products of mergers between large galaxies, most of them with a black hole at their centre. In a trawl for novel quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer have now uncovered one such object, J153636.22+044127.0. It shows two broad-line emission systems with different redshifts — 0.3727 and 0.3889 — equivalent to a velocity difference of 3,500 kilometres per second. They interpret the object as a binary system of two black holes, with masses of 107.3 and 108.9 solar masses separated by about 0.1 parsec and with an orbital period of about 100 years. The discovery of this object provides support for theories that predict the formation of binary black holes during galactic mega-mergers.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07779 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:458:y:2009:i:7234:d:10.1038_nature07779

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature07779

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().