Thanks to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers spotted a double black hole that lies at the center of a galaxy and is fueling a nearby quasar.
According to a NASA news release, the galaxy is named Markarian 231 (Mrk 231) and was identified as the nearest one to Earth that also contained a quasar. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the new study indicates binary black holes may be orbiting one another in many more quasars at the center of active galaxies.
"We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary black hole in Mrk 231, but also paves a new way to systematically search binary black holes via the nature of their ultraviolet light emission," Youjun Lu, of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, said in the release.
Xinyu Dai, a contributor to the study at the University of Oklahoma, said the discovery could be explained by the nature of how galaxies grow.
"The structure of our universe, such as those giant galaxies and clusters of galaxies, grows by merging smaller systems into larger ones, and binary black holes are natural consequences of these mergers of galaxies," Dai said in the release.
The new study comes around the same time as a new theory from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Regarding black holes, CNN noted, Hawking proposed that they are not actually endless and have an exit.
"The hole would need to be large, and if it was rotating, it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn't come back to our universe," Hawking previously stated, according to CNN. "So, although I'm keen on space flight, I'm not going to try that."
