TWO monster black holes are jostling for power in the same galaxy, the Chandra X-ray satellite has revealed. The pair, currently circling about 3000 light years apart, will slam into each other in a few hundred million years’ time, rattling the fabric of space-time.
Stefanie Komossa and her colleagues used Chandra to look at an extraordinarily bright galaxy called NGC 6240, about 400 million light years away. The galaxy has two bright knots near its centre. “We hoped to determine which one of the nuclei was an active supermassive black hole,” says Komossa, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial…
